Tuesday Means UFOs
by lin.exe
Summary: How did it come to this? IZJtHM crossover. ZADR.
1. Prologue

**TUESDAY MEANS UFOs**

WARNINGS: Crossover with Johnny the Homicidal Maniac; future ZADR (that means slash, folks); violence; a whole lotta cussing; unwarranted use of caps; Mormon-death.

DISCLAIMER: Invader Zim belongs to the crankypants himself, Jhonen "Don't Call Me Johnen" Vasquez, whose belly I strive to make ill, despite my love for his work.

NOTES: Mostly I'm taking advantage of the fact that Jhonen's character designs tend to look similar. Future chapters will be longer, but may also be an eternity in coming, especially if I fail to finish before school restarts. Now enjoy.

**PROLOGUE**

A short Thing slouched along the pavement blocks. Its fuzzy Russian hat and fur-lined brown jacket looked like they had been chew-toys to the little dog squeaking along behind. Between the hat and jacket collar the Thing's face peeked out, pale green and noseless. It scowled.

It stopped in front of the dingiest house on the block. Number 777: windows X'd out with rotting boards, and churned up dirt in place of a lawn, with a sign reading "KEEP OFF – It's impolite to walk on the dead."

"Eyuch." Zim pulled off his fuzzy hat and brushed a hand over his antennae. "The worm-baby has even worse taste than usual. This place STINKS of human filth."

The little dog squealed, "It tastes like shampoo!"

"GIR! Stop licking the pavement."

He tugged the leash. Gir flopped to the ground and slid along on his back for a few paces before bouncing up and piggybacking on his master. Zim gritted his teeth, but didn't push the S.I.R. unit off. Instead he shoved his hands into his jacket pockets and started for the shack's front door.

He'd just raised his hand to poke the doorbell when the door swung open and flattened him against the house.

"NO!" screamed whatever had shoved the door open. "GET AWAY FROM ME! AAAAUGH NO! I JUST WANTED TO REDEEM YOUR SOU—AAAAARRCK!"

As the door swung away from the alien now lodged in a Zim-shaped dent in the wall, he caught a glimpse of a stocky man in a dress shirt and tie being dragged back toward the house. A tall, noodle-thin man had looped a length of thin bungie cord around the shorter's neck, and now pulled at one end while the metal hook at the other dug into the man's skin.

The thin one paused when he saw Zim smacked up against the house. He glanced at the well-dressed man, kicking and clawing at his own throat, looked back at Zim and shrugged. "Mormons. Always calling at dinnertime, y'know?"

He hauled his prisoner inside and slammed the door.

Zim peeled himself off the wall and dusted off his jacket, giving the house a wary glare. He crept back onto the stoop, holding up his hands in fear of another door-assault – which did come, just as his toe touched the "WHAT?" welcome-mat. He wheeled backwards as the door clipped the space where his nose should have been, and fell on his Irken ass.

The tall, thin man towered over him. Two drooping tufts of hair grew like horns just over his forehead. His black leather jacket and frowny-face t-shirt were splattered with blood; the buckles on his boots clinked when he stepped up to Zim.

"But why is there a Russian stuck to my house?!" He pulled Zim up by the collar. "WHY IS THERE ALWAYS A GODDAMN RUSSIAN STUCK TO MY HOUSE?!"

Zim's eyes bulged. One of his contacts dropped to the ground with a -plink- and his fuzzy hat slid off.

"Russians with antennae?" The thin man cocked his head.

Zim recovered and began to flail in the man's grip. "Ergh! Nnf! UNHAND ME STINKBEAST! I have come for my REVENGE, not to listen to your" he twitched "pathetic Earth-insults."

"'Russians' isn't a—" The man froze. He dropped the alien, who clenched his fists at his sides and growled up at him.

"Wait, I don't talk like that. And how did I know he thought 'Russians' was an insult?" He started to back away, jabbing a finger at Zim. "Shit. What the fuck are you doing to my head, little man? I don't NEED anyone else fucking with my head right now!"

He grabbed the knob, and moved to pull the door closed. By now out of patience, Zim latched onto the wood with a crushing grip and halted the door mid-swing. He glared up at the thin man with one purple and one red eye.

"Enough stalling, DIB," he said. "If you're done talking to yourself, I'd like to get to the part where I DESTROY YOU FOR THWARTING ME."

"'Dib.'" The man slumped against the doorframe. "'Dib' -- no, my name is Johnny C. Go away, little man. You incite strange emotions in me."

At this Zim's glare softened, and his antennae flattened against his head. He loosened his grip enough for Johnny to pull the door closed, then stood on the stoop with a blank expression.

Eventually Gir squeaked up and tugged at his pants. "I found drumsticks in the lawn! I can play drums now, whatchiss!"

The S.I.R. held up the pair of human bones he'd dug up and began to beat them against the concrete. Zim looked down at him, turned, and paced back toward the street, still holding a blank face. Gir tossed the bones into his mouth and ran after his master.

"Weee! I am a god of rock and roll!"


	2. The Cost of Bologna

**NOTES: **Thankee-sais to OvenFresh, andalitebandit, ArmAndLeg, pinky-pseudonym, and ShikamaruNoMiko for the reviews.

Thank god I got this done before school started. I warn you that updates are going to be sketchy between now and April. Uni, and my fiction workshop in particular, tend to trump even raging Zimsession.

Just a quick note that "Saltation Army" isn't a typo, just a reasonably stupid play on words.

**WARNING: **Implied violence; flashbacks; fabricated elements; vague reference to reproductive organs.

-----------------------------

**Chapter One: THE COST OF ****BOLOGNA**

That night Zim sat in a horrible, cheap hotel room trying to ignore the amorous shouts and thumps next door (and above him… and across the hall), and completely at a loss. He'd spent the better part of a decade tracking down the Dib-beast, then choked at his supposed moment of victory. No, not choked – ZIM does not choke. But he sure hadn't obtained any sweet, sweet revenge.

No matter: he'd have his tomorrow. He smoothed out his fur-lined jacket, hung it over the back of a chair and topped it with the hat. It was his last and only disguise, scrounged from a Saltation Army discard pile, and one he'd been wearing for a good three years now. Not nearly as ingenious as his first few, but effective for two reasons: one, that people tended to turn a blind eye to anyone in foreign-looking dress; two, that, as Tak discovered, people just didn't notice.

What he wouldn't give for some of his old technology though. All the toys that miserable Dib-thing robbed him of. Zim's fists clenched, claws gouging into the gloves' brown leather.

"The human should have killed me while he had the chance."

-----------------------------

A city sector away, Johnny C. sat on a stool in the middle of a room three storeys underground. Behind him the Mormon gurgled, no longer tugging at the chains that held him spread-eagle against the wall. Johnny let out a long breath and tossed a pair of blood-coated chopsticks onto a tray alongside a set of pliers and, inexplicably, a metal slinky. He rose and trudged up the stairs to ground level.

"Still thinking of the green one?" asked Meat from atop his cardboard box.

Johnny peered out between the window-boards at the overcast night sky. "I don't understand my reaction to him. It's like listening to Devi's voice and screaming Mormons at the same time. Why didn't I want to peel his skin off, or anything, like I usually do when people come to my door?"

"Because you'd rather peel his jacket off, Johnny."

He whirled. "Never! You know my policy on physical longing! On touching!" He paused, and blinked. "Also, I don't think he's human."

"Oh, but that didn't stop you before."

Johnny's eye twitched shut; his head ticced to the side and he pressed a gloved hand to his temple. "Ow! Shit, what the hell do you mean, 'before'?"

"I told you, didn't I? The 'pretty girl' who gave me to you. What you did to 'her' and 'she' to you. Rather, you told your sister it was a girl she heard you with." Meat chuckled. "But Johnny, what kind of girl gives her man a Burger Boy as a gift? Who could be so misguided as to mistake it for romantic?"

Johnny backed into the wall beside the window and slowly slid downward. He gripped his head, squeezed his eyes shut and screamed at the Burger Boy to shut the fuck up. Something had fissured inside his head and started leaking green acid memory goo. Green all over the inside of his skull, behind his eyes. Green in his ears somehow amplifying Meat's taunting.

He never could remember anything before this house, and now he realized why. Memory goo hurt. It burned a hole to his throat, which locked up and pushed tears into his eyes. It dripped down into his chest and stomach and invaded his veins.

Johnny C. sat against the cracked wall with his knees drawn up to his chest, and remembered a time when he wanted to save the human race, instead of stick hooks through it one idiot at a time.

-----------------------------

Sometimes Dib wondered just how much of it was caused by bologna.

It had been his father who finally reverted them from their bologna-state. He'd found the lab notes they made during their frantic search for a cure, and, being the great Professor Membrane, quickly perfected their formula. He'd needed some of their pre-bologna DNA for the reversion: Dib's was easy enough to find – skin cells on the bed, hair in the shower – but Zim had no hair to shed, and any genetic material still inside his Base was off-limits as long as the computer didn't recognize him. They finally managed to glean some skin cells and antennae fuzz off his desk at skool, but couldn't compile a complete sample of Irken DNA. They made up the difference with altered human genetic material. Much to his chagrin, Zim was now one one-hundredth Wormbaby.

The consequences reared their ugly heads in Middel Skool, when Zim appeared to go through puberty with the rest of his classmates – albeit a half-assed pubescence: his voice only dropped a pitch or two; he remained entirely hairless; he sprouted to a mighty four foot eleven.

There were… other developments that, at the time, Dib would rather not have known about. But the probes and cameras he'd had Gir place in the lower levels of the Base recorded everything and, being the good and diligent surveillant he was, he damn well watched everything.

It turned out that, in response to the hormones released during his sort-of-puberty, Zim had begun to grow certain -parts- long since made obsolete by the Irken birthing machines. He spent a good week away from skool, panicking and interrogating the computer about parasites and tumours until the growth's cause was determined. Dib couldn't decide whether to laugh or puke.

By February of grade ten, Dib wondered if the human DNA hadn't had other effects on Zim – or if Irkens were able to fall in love anyway.

One Friday evening near the end of January, Dib watched as Zim discovered Earth's downfall, and reported it to his leaders.

"My Tallest! My Tallest!" Zim bounced around in front of the screen. "I realize now why this mission you gave me was so very seeecret." He wiggled his fingers.

The red-eyed Tallest raised an antenna. "Do you now."

"Oh yes. But you should have TOLD me this disgusting little rock was Choconium-rich; I would have had it mined and delivered years ago."

Tallest Red's eyes bulged. In the background, Purple froze and let his yo-yo drop to the floor.

"Choconium?" said Purple. "On Earp?"

"Earth," Zim corrected. "Well, yes, I realize now that only something so DELICIOUSLY PRECIOUS could warrant such an important mission, and highly-skilled Invader as myself."

Dib rolled his eyes.

"Er, yes, of course," said Red. "But it was only a, uh, RUMOUR of Choconium deposits that lead us there, so we'll need you to get us some conclusive evidence first."

"Chocooonium," said Purple, who appeared to be drooling and chewing on his yo-yo string.

"Consider it done, my Tallest. I will have a sample for you before the week is out."

The screen cut to static. Zim collapsed onto an easy chair with a sigh and an enormous zipper-tooth grin. Gir log-rolled into the room.

"Finally some progress, Gir!" Zim stretched and laced his fingers behind his head. "These filthy pig-humans don't know what they're sitting on. An entire layer of the purest, most amazing snack-food coating in the universe, just under the planet's crust. Can you TASTE our victory, Gir?"

Gir stopped rolling and stared up at the ceiling for a moment.

"Ah have nooooooo legs," he said at last, and went back to rolling.

It looked like the show was over for the night. Dib moved to take off his headphones, but Zim suddenly growled, leapt up and started pacing back and forth across the room. The Irken muttered to himself, too quiet for Dib to pick up.

Finally he stopped and said, "Computer."

"Yes?"

"Still no information on Unidentified Sensation oh-five?"

Dib leaned in close. For weeks Zim had been complaining about new and unidentified "sensations" and bothering the computer to define them for him. Unidentified Sensation oh-one had been sleepiness: the puberty process seemed to have amplified the influence of his human DNA, and Zim now needed an hour of sleep per day. The other three had been similar symptoms of his dysfunctional genetics, but so far oh-five had escaped them.

"I told you," said the computer, "I can't come up with anything based on vague squeedly-spooch discomfort, hot flashes and itchy hands."

Zim clutched his stomach-area. "But my squeedly-spooch! It twists!"

If the computer had a nose, Dib was sure it would be massaging its bridge. "Indigestion, maybe?"

"No." Zim crossed his arms and stared off out the window. "What if… I'd found a catalyst?"

"A catalyst."

"Yes. Something that always brings on oh-five. Say, one of the stinkbeasts."

The computer voice fell silent. Around him, the house crackled and beeped like a giant version of Dib's hard drive. Dib fumbled for his can of Classic Poop without looking away from the screen.

"Sexual attraction," said the computer. "In extreme cases, love."

Dib choked, and sprayed a mouthful of Classic Poop onto the monitor. He quickly wiped it off with his sleeve so he could catch Zim's reaction.

Zim scratched at the side of his head. After a good moment's silence he said, "Meaning?"

"You wish to attain a heightened level of physical intimacy with your 'catalyst'."

Zim still looked confused. His antennae unbalanced behind his head.

A click and pause from the computer. A screen hovered into the space between Zim and Dib's camera, facing away from the human's prying eyes. "These are some of the activities one typically engages in with a lover."

Light from the screen flickered on Zim's face, turned the lime a bluer shade. His eyes widened. His jaw worked for a few beats before he managed a horrified, "No. No! NO! NOOOO!"

He clutched his head and shrieked, then fell backwards and scooted away from the still-flickering screen. The Irken drew his knees up to his chest and sat shivering on the floor.

"Horrible," he muttered. Dib had to hold his head right up to the speaker to catch Zim's words. "Horrible, hideous practices, all squishy and gooey and limbs where they shouldn't – ugh, UGH. How am I supposed to do that? They expect me to do… _that _with the Dib-beast?"

Dib pulled back so suddenly he nearly toppled out of his chair. He flailed and latched onto the desk as if it was the only thing keeping him from falling off the face of the Earth; his heart pinballed around his ribcage and his skin seemed to turn to a layer of wet rag. He was NOT hearing this. Zim was experiencing sexual attraction, apparently for the first time, and he of all people was the catalyst?

On the monitor, Zim was still cowering. Dib eyed his huge red eyes, thin shuddering frame and antennae laid back against his head. He had never felt so superior to the Irken. He felt the buzz of power-tripping race across his fingertips.

Dib went over the conversation in his head. Zim's leaders had shown an undue amount of interest in his reports of "Choconium" deposits in the Earth. He got the idea that even if Zim wasn't much of a threat on his own, the forces backing him were plenty to contend with. If those confirmation reports got to the Tallest, Earth was finally in real danger.

"But I could distract him," said Dib, "and make him miss his due date at the end of the week. That'd at least buy Earth some time to build up its defences. And if I could distract him long enough, he might forget about the whole 'Choconium' thing, or his leaders might just think figure he's crying wolf and stop listening. They don't seem to have a whole lot of patience with him to start with."

And now he had the means to distract him, the perfect ploy to wrench Zim's attention away from invasion. If he could just bring himself to pretend he returned the alien's affection, he could put a kink in his formerly unbendable will. He could have control.

Dib crawled into bed and put his back to the computer and the shaken alien now pacing on the monitor. He fell asleep with his fingers still thrilling at the thought of this new power.


	3. Lik'M'Irken

**Notes: **It's been two years. Will you kill me if I tell you this has been mostly-done for at least a year and a half, but I keep telling myself I'll edit the sucker and add a half-scene to the end before I post? Today I'm giving up on those delusions. I also finally settled on a chapter name.

Thankee-sais to everyone who commented, and massive apologies for the wait. If anyone has actually stuck around this long, I hope this chapter does not disappoint. It involves a dimly lit storage room. Don't tell me I don't get you nice things.

A year and a half ago I probably had important notes on this chapter, but they are lost to obscurity now.

**WARNING: **Threat of explosion; candy; interspecies lip-touching; truancy.

-----------------------------

**Chapter Two: LIK-M-IRKEN**

He began on Monday with a subtle approach, a program of pointedly not trying to incise Zim's torso and remove his organs. His efforts were lost on the alien, who was too busy trying to plant nano-bombs in the cafeteria food to notice he was no longer being hunted. By the end of first period Dib came to his senses and remembered just how effective anything less than a nailbat to the head was on Zim.

On to plan B. Dib skipped second period Comp Sci (after mastering Irken technology, user-friendly operating systems and html just didn't hold much challenge for him), made a quick trip to the nearest 24/7 mart and returned to the skool by the beginning of lunch break.

The cafeteria buzzed with conversation and the clicks of plastic forks against plastic trays. Dib dragged a grey metal chair over to Zim's table and sat facing him, putting on what he hoped was a disarming smile.

Zim mirrored the grin, but with a malicious little quirk at the corner. "Enjoy your lunch, Earth-stink? Experiencing any," he twirled his hand, "discomfort around the belly-region, by any chance?"

"Actually I—"

"Well TOO BAD!" Zim's chair went clattering to the floor; he climbed onto the rickety table and jabbed a finger in Dib's face. "There IS no antidote for the nano-bombs in your food! Soon this entire room will fill with the screams of exploded-bellied pig-babies! HAH!"

The room's steady buzz ground to a halt. At the table next to Zim's, a kid whose Adam's apple seemed to drag his head down toward the table sat frozen with a spoonful of pseudo-stew hovering at his lips. Beige sludge dripped from his spoon to the tray below. The kid's eyes bugged at Zim.

"—Is what I would certainly say, if I had the technology to make nano-bombs at all. Which I don't. Because I'm normal." Zim slid off the table, righted his chair and sat with his hands folded primly in his lap.

The students seemed to give a collective shrug and went back to shovelling almost-food in their faces. Zim wiped a hand across his forehead and relaxed into a slouch.

"Actually," said Dib, "I brought my own lunch today." He rummaged around in his backpack and brought out a clear plastic grocery produce bag. He undid the loose knot holding it closed and pulled out a squashed sandwich, apple and a flat paper packet splashed with bright text: Fun Dip. "I… thought you might be hungry – since you can't actually eat the cafeteria food. Here." He held the packet out toward Zim.

The Irken stared at the offering. A tiny crease appeared between his eyes.

Dib shook the packet at him. "It has nearly the same chemical composition as Irken food. I know: I checked it out on Tak's ship's computer."

Zim crossed his arms and tipped his chair back, boots braced on the edge of the table. "You expect ZIM to accept food from the likes of YOU? I'm disappointed, Dib – as thwarting goes, this is just pathetic."

"Come on." It took every ounce of his willpower not to throw the packet at the alien's angular green head. Dib tore into the first two sections of the packet, pulled out the Lik-a-Stix, licked and dipped it in the red sugar crystals, then stuck the end of the stick in his mouth. He bit a small chunk off the red-coated end, chewed and swallowed. "See? There's nothing wrong with it."

Zim pointed at the chalky Lick-a-Stix. "It's got your germs on it."

Dib threw his hands in the air, showering the students behind him with cherry flavoured Fun Dip. "Zim! I'm _trying _to make peace here. I want to stop fighting with you. Can't you get that into that stupid green head of yours?"

"Why should I believe you DIB? Why now, of all times, would you decide to give up your mission to save this HIDEOUS planet of yours, and bring me food-things instead?"

Perfect: just the opening he was looking for. Dib took a deep breath, steeled himself. He'd have to be smack-in-the-face obvious for Zim to even pick up on the point of his "slip up" – so he said it with extra force, each word clear and drawn out.

"Because I want—" He paused, pretended to catch himself, and drew in a huge gasp.

Zim cocked his head. Dib cleared his throat loudly and made a big show of gathering his lunch (minus the Fun Dip packet) back into his backpack without looking up at the Irken. He pulled the straps over his shoulders and scrambled out of the cafeteria, head down.

Out in hallway, Dib dropped the pinch-browed "distress" face and leaned against a locker. Well, if _that_ didn't pique the alien's curiosity, he really was going to have to resort to the nailbat. He pressed his cheek to the cool green metal and let out a long breath. Repressing the instinct to insult and hurl threats at Zim was harder than he'd expected. After five years, even the thought of his ridiculous red dress-thing evoked a dozen synonyms for "stupid" in Dib's mind.

A long electronic buzz signalled the start of third period. He pulled his face away from the locker's peeling paint and strode off toward his English classroom.

-----------------------------

That night Zim descended to the lower levels of his base and sat twirling in his high-backed purple chair. Wall, wall, wall, control panel, wall, wall. The screen on the panel displayed a list of potential Choconium mine sites, but Zim hardly glanced at them as he spun past. Finally he slowed and squeaked to a stop.

"My nano-bombs didn't work, you know," he said to the empty room. "I checked their programming after the Earth-pigs failed to explode, and it was full of errors." He paused. "I programmed them myself."

He slouched lower in the chair and tilted it back to stare at the intestine-twists of purple tubing on the ceiling.

"What IS this?" He clenched his fists. "ZIM does not program poorly! Zim does not MAKE such glaringly obvious errors!" Then, in an awed voice, "Have _I _the brain-worms?"

He lurched out of his chair and began to pace the room, boots ticking on the plasticky floor. So he hadn't been paying full attention to the nano-bombs when he coded them last night. What _had _been on his brainmeats, then?

That horrible, big-headed boy.

"Computer!" he barked. "The Dib-stink is acting strangely. And not his usual strange, either. He claimed to want to make peace with me, and tried to make me eat his revolting Earth-foods."

The computer droned, "Probably a trap of some kind."

"So I concluded! But then I asked him why I should believe his filthy lies." Zim recounted Dib's apparent self-censoring, then whirled on the control panel. "What could he possibly _want _that makes him go so, so weirder-than-usual?"

Exasperated, "I don't _know._"

The alien huffed and ran a hand across his antennae. "This… 'lovetraction' you told me about yesterday. It got worse when he was weird at me. Anything on that, computer?"

"His attempts to make peace appeal to your hope that he reciprocates."

"LIES!" Zim thumped the panel with his fist. "If he reciprocates, those hideous—" he writhed, "—awful things you showed me would follow, yes? There is nothing ZIM wants less than icky… rollings-about with the stink-boy."

He kicked the control panel's base, gave a strangled cry and went hopping around the room, gripping his foot. He threw a sour look at the control panel, then limped to a transport tube and headed for the base's upper levels.

-----------------------------

Dib laced his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. He couldn't wipe the grin off his face – this plan was going better than he'd hoped. Just one day of "peacemaking" and he already had Zim botching nano-bombs and ignoring his Choconium search.

He reached for the mouse, minimized the window displaying Zim's base and brought up his digital dayplanner. It had been three months since the Swollen Eyeballs banned his last alias – good: that meant he could set up a new one without arousing suspicion. This would be his sixth alias since "Agent Mothman". Over the past five years he'd gotten better at surveillance, but still managed to screw up in delivering it to the Network. His longest-lived alias, "Agent Anasazi," had lasted a year and a half, but most got themselves booted after six months or so.

He brought up the IP-masking and voice-scrambling programs, and rummaged in his closet for a hat. He'd already used the toque, deerstalker, costume top hat, cat-in-the-hat-hat, cowboy hat – damn, he was out of ways to disguise his hair-scythe. "Agent Duane Barry" had already gone the slicked-back route, so what was left?

Dib marched to the bathroom and grabbed the bottle of hair gel he'd used for "Duane Barry." He mushed it into his hair, tried to split the scythe down the center and flatten it down the sides of his head. Instead the two sections popped back up and hung forward over his face, like backward Irken antennae, or devil horns – or bunny ears. The image sparked a twinge at the centre of his forehead. He shivered, then shrugged; in silhouette it set him apart from "Agent Mothman," and that was all that mattered.

Back at his computer, he took his glasses off, switched on the camera and microphone, and connected to the Network. His voice came out nasal and grinding through the scrambler. Near the end of his application interview he realized he hadn't chosen handle for his alias, and frantically searched the room for inspiration.

Agent Dark Booty's gravelly voice ran through the terms of membership, and finally came to the question: "What handle can we contact you under?"

"Uh." Dib scanned his bookshelf. A weather-beaten book spine caught his eye: _Crop Circles of the Northwest_, by Jonathan Cullin. "Jona – Johnny. Johnny C."

Dark Booty's head dipped. "We'll be in touch, potential Agent Johnny C."

The connection cut. Dib pushed the mic away and absently tugged at one of his hair-horns. "Agent Johnny C."? Lame. But at least he would be back in the Network. And once he'd lulled Zim into a false sense of security, he'd rope the alien, stuff him in a box and personally deliver him to the Eyeballs' headquarters.

That grin was back.

-----------------------------

He could hardly believe Zim's reactions to him over the next few days. Tuesday he accepted Dib's second offer of Fun Dip – albeit grudgingly, and making a big show of "gracing the human with his consent." The insults and death threats lost their _oomph _by Wednesday; on Thursday he picked up a twitch that wouldn't allow him to look Dib in the eye for more than a few seconds.

The human played it up a little: got "caught" staring at the alien in class, mimicked the eye-contact twitch, put on a running Flustered Act whenever he came near Zim. Each night Zim would report the symptoms to his base's computer, with consistent results. _Probable reciprocation._

Friday morning Dib cleared the school's front doors, only to discover he was strutting – _strutting_ down the hall to first period Chemistry. Dib, as a general rule, rarely attempted anything more ambitious than a slouch or a stalk. But that day his too-big teenage feet propelled him down the hallway like he'd conquered and rebuilt the place in his own, utterly handsome image.

He just couldn't get enough of Zim's sudden shift in nature. Dib had started the week with a flimsy plan to stall the Irken, and ended it within clear sight of overall victory. It was so easy, so ultimately satisfying—

He spied Zim approaching from the other end of the hall, and forced his feet back into their usual, unenthusiastic pace. He kept his head down, throwing the occasional "shy" glance at the alien as they passed each other. In return, Zim stared blatantly, the tilt of his mouth and brow-ridges implying Dib had grown a sunflower out of the top of his head, or announced his retirement from paranormal investigation.

They'd almost passed each other when Zim's hand latched onto Dib's upper arm with surprising force.

Dib's head snapped up. "Huh?"

The Irken glared up at him for a long moment. The warning bell sounded and the throng of students around them thickened, flowed passed them leaving an eye-shaped gap where they stood. Then Zim dragged Dib through the crowd to a door marked "art storage" and shoved him inside.

Dib flipped a switch by the door, and on the ceiling one of two bare bulbs flared and fell dead, leaving them in orangey half-dark. Old, chewed and re-re-lacquered wood shelves divided the room into three narrow isles; bags of clay and containers of low-grade acrylics shaped like bleach jugs filled most of the shelves.

Zim whirled on him. "Stinkbeast! I tire of this… whatever we're doing."

"Standing in a storage room?"

The alien growled; thin mechanical legs extended out of his Pak and lifted him so he could loom over Dib.

Crap. He hadn't counted on Zim actually _doing _anything about his attraction. A glaring oversight on his part, really – what had Zim _not _acted brashly in reaction to impulse? Now he either had to give up the game, or continue to play along – by following through.

He felt a tickle at the back of his throat at the thought. He also felt the door's rough wood against his back.

"After observing your hideous beast-thing practices all week, I have come to the conclusion that—"

Something on Zim warbled like a cellphone tone. His eyes widened, and he backed off and retracted the spider legs, replacing them with a binder-sized video screen on a thin metal arm.

"My Tallest?" He tilted his head.

"Zim!" The light on Zim's face flashed purple. "You got us any moon-sized chunks of Brown Gold yet, huh? Huh? Hm? Well?"

Zim stared blankly at the screen.

The monitor's glow went red, and a deeper voice spoke. "The Choconium reports you promised us, Zim?"

He blinked. His eyelids made a disturbing _squish _as they flickered shut, then open again.

"Zim? Hellooo?" The voice faded briefly, as if the speaker had turned away from the input. "Did he put us on hold? Is that a hold screen?

Zim snapped out of it. "Whe? The Choconium reports! Oh, I finished those _months _ago." He flapped a hand dismissively.

Purple again: "But we only gave you the assignment three days ago."

"Er," Zim faltered, then his usual smug expression returned. "Then you must admire my foresight. ADMIRE IT!"

Keeping a wary eye on the Irken, Dib eased the door open a crack.

"Whatever, Zim." Red's patience had apparently run out. "Just get us those reports, okay?"

"Of course, my Tallest. I'll just, eh, go get them right now. In their entirely completed state. Yes, they sure are comprehensive."

Dib froze, halfway out the door. He knew how this would go: Zim would find some bungling way to round up, or at least fabricate enough data to convince his leaders to finally take the Earth. And he'd been _so close _to derailing the alien for good. He bit his lip and turned back toward Zim.

He'd retracted the monitor, and now stalked toward Dib. "Move, Dib-beast!"

"Zim, wait." His voice had a panicky edge he hadn't expected. Maybe he could use it to his advantage. "What did you drag me in here to talk about? You said something about a conclusion you'd come to—"

"Not important." Zim looked down his non-existent nose at him. "Whatever Earth-sensations I seem to have contracted from your filth will hardly matter once your planet is converted to a galactic convenience mart."

"What sensations?"

"_Hideous _ones." Zim grimaced. He moved to shoulder past Dib.

If their five-plus-year battle were reduced to a round of tug-o-war, the past week or so would consist of Dib pointing at the sky, shouting "Look! Your Tallest are having a pool party without you!" then reeling in the rope when Zim turned around to ogle – and the past five minutes would consist of Zim catching onto the ploy and yanking the rope back hard enough to knock Dib off his feet.

He watched at five years of bitter struggle snaked past his palms, yellow nylon like liquid. Adrenaline spiked and throbbed at his temples: he _had to _make this one desperate grasp. _At any cost._

Dib sucked in a breath, clenched one fist. Attached the other to the front of Zim's stupid pink dress and tugged the Irken upward.

The kiss was quick – a declaration; a kind of romantic glove-slap. He drove his lips into Zim's and pressed a hand to the back of his head to hold him there. The alien's lips were rubbery and unnervingly smooth – like softened wax or a semi-inflated balloon. Dib's shoulders shook as he fought the urge to gag.

He pulled back with a gasp, stumbled backward into a set of shelves, and winced as a bundle of coloured pencils clattered over his head.

Zim appeared to have been petrified. He was frozen with his head tilted up, hands held in front of him as if gesturing, "back off." His eyes bugged out, staring at the space where Dib's head had been a second ago.

"Uh, Zim?"

The alien's hands dropped. Still dazed, he looked to Dib. "That was—?"

"I kissed you."

He gave a slow nod. "I see."

Dib swallowed noisily and waiting for the impending explosion of Irken fury.

Zim's brow furrowed. "Why can't I feel my legs?"

Dib let out a breath and felt a grin quirk at the corners of his mouth. "It means you liked it, Zim."

The alien shrieked and tugged at his own wig, "Rrrrrgh, WHY? Of all the horrible Earth-plagues! The info-clip the computer showed me – this mouth-touchy-thing, it –" He clutched at his uniform. "—YOU MAY NOT UNCLOTHE THE MIGHTY ZIM!"

"I wasn't going to."

Zim ignored him, but stopped convulsing. He stared absently into the room's orange gloom. "But if the stinkboy _initiated _the kiss… i… fication, then that means—"

_It means I like you, you dumb alien. Or, at least, "like" you. Heh. Now figure it out before I have to do anything else gross._

The Irken pointed to Dib, eyes wide. "Reciprocation."

_God. Finally._

"I told you I didn't want to fight you any more."

"And you'd rather we did this," Zim pointed back and forth between himself and the human, "mouthy-thing instead? What about when I become the slave-master of your whole pitiful species?"

Challenges and snide responses bubbled in the back of Dib's throat. His tongue occupied with pushing them back, he just shrugged. Suddenly the room's paint-and-wax smell thickened, and he decided he needed out before he asphyxiated – or worse, let Zim on to his ruse. He grabbed the alien's wrist and pulled him through the door.

"What are you—"

"We're going to play hooky today." Dib dragged him down the deserted hall, and out through the Skool's double front doors.


	4. Non Newtonian Time Release Explosives

**NOTES**: Bet you didn't think I was ever going to update this. I sure didn't. But I was rewatching my Zim DVDs and rereading the first few chapters, and suddenly, after what, four years? Suddenly my inspiration returned. So hopefully this time I'll get it done.

The supermarket called Blahblah's is a stupid Ontario in-joke – we have a store chain called Loblaws.

A Non-Newtonian Fluid is a substance that acts like a solid when pressure is applied to it. It has nothing to do with Dib's explosives, except that it sounded decently scientific, and was all he could come up with on the spot. For more information, Wiki it, or Youtube the segments on QI or Mythbusters where they explain the stuff.

Thank you so much to everyone who commented, and everyone who's stuck around this long. I'm already working on the next chapter, so _hopefully _there will be more soon.

**WARNINGS**: Gratuitous em-dash use; bus surfing; non-consensual brain probe placement; pistachio pudding; interspecies hand-holding; foreshadowing like anvils; lies, lies and more lies.

--

**Chapter 3: TIME RELEASE NON-NEWTONIAN EXPLOSIVES**

If there was one thing Dib could rely on, it was Zim being clueless about the planet he planned to conquer.

They had hitched a ride away from the Skool on a transit bus -- not in, but on. Dib suggested the more traditional "inside" approach, but somewhere along the line, Zim developed a fear of public transit interiors. Instead the alien grasped Dib by the arm, hauled him up and spider-legged it onto the bus's sun-hot metal roof. Now they rode into the city's downtown sector, Zim's stupid wig nearly flying off his head, Dib clinging to rivet heads and hoping the driver would make no sudden stops.

"So," said Zim. "These time-delayed non-Newtonian explosives. You say you already have some, hm?"

The bus pulled a sharp turn, and Dib's legs scrambled on the roof. "No, but I kn-know -- where we can get some. Go up and check the number on this bus."

Zim used a pair of his metal legs to drag himself to the front of the bus and peer over the edge. He turned and called back to Dib, "These are not digits, miserable Dib! You expect the superior mind of Zim to decode your nonsensical Earth gibberish?"

"You can't even read _numbers_?"

"I can read number. These are no numbers! All I see are two symbols shaped like lopsided Modevreds."

"Like whats?"

"Like this!" Zim let go of the edge and stuck one thin arm in the air, one out to the side, forming an L.

Dib bonked his forehead on the bus roof. "It's upside down, you stup--" He gritted his teeth. "You endearing. Weird. Alien. We're on the 77. Which means we'll pass a Blahblah's market in about three blocks. They'll have the pu--the explosives."

Zim rubbed his palms together and grinned. "Yess. And once we--" The bus slammed to a stop and the alien toppled over the edge.

Curiously, instead of shouting "Yes!" and pumping his fists in the air, Dib reached out and called, "Zim!" with a note of what may or may not have been concern. He slapped his hand over his mouth. This whole pretending-not-to-hate-Zim must be getting to him. He vowed to spend the evening fine-tuning the containment device in which he would deliver Zim to the authorities.

Inside the bus, someone started shrieking, and soon a line of panicked passengers streamed out the back doors. Zim re-emerged at the front of the bus and clambered back onto the roof. Of course it would take more that a tumble like that to get rid of him. Dib raised an eyebrow. The alien posed with his fists on his hips and responded with a smug smile.

Two spider legs stretched out from Zim's sides and trailed off the edges of the bus roof. "Worry not, infatuated human. The symbols on this transport are irrelevant. I have taken control of its pilot's brain." He beamed and pointed at the extended spider legs. "I put probes in her head!"

Dib's hands tensed against the metal so hard his knuckles popped. It was always the same with Zim: overcome a small inconvenience by sticking probes in someone's brain. He was ruining people's lives, and _on a whim. _And now Dib had to pretend not to care.

Liverwurst. He was going to line the containment jacket with liverwurst. The meat and moisture would sear Zim's skin the whole time he was wrapped inside.

Dib forced a shrug. "Great idea, Zim. Can you get us two blocks up and one right?"

"Can I? _Can I? _You doubt the abilities of Zim?" He about-faced and pointed ahead. "_Onward bus slave!_" The bus accelerated, knocking Zim off his feet. They reached Blahblah's before Dib could even fight back the carsickness.

Zim peeled Dib off the metal and lowered him to the sidewalk with surprising gentleness. Dib dusted his arms off and wobbled into the supermarket. Zim retracted his spider legs -- as he pulled the two top ones out of the bus, an androgynous scream came from the driver's seat.

Dib didn't look back. Zim followed him through the automatic doors in his stupid stiff-legged strut, and they headed for aisle 6: desserts.

--

They sat on a thick tree limb, a few feet back from the entrance to Muzzle Duck Park. Dib, something of a surveillance expert after years of spying on Zim, had spotted the perch. It was perfect: they had a clear trajectory to the park's main path, but enough tree limbs in the between them and their victims that they could remain more or less hidden

Dib funnelled another cup of green pistachio pudding into a baseball-sized water balloon. Yes, if there was one thing he could count on, it was Zim's utter ignorance of the workings of planet Earth.

Zim hefted a pudding-filled water balloon, peered at it, sniffed it. "Tell Zim again how these balls of goo will help him rain _doom _upon the humans?"

Dib peeled the foil off a pistachio pudding cup. "The time-delayed non-Newtonian explosive substance, once attached to a target, remains dormant for a set period of time, then eventually explodes the target. Um. Slowly."

"And horribly?" Zim perked up.

"Sure."

Zim produced a large elastic loop and fitted it around two of the spider legs. He stretched them apart, forming a slingshot above his head. "Dib, you have surely made the right choice, betraying the rest of your worm-people to enslave yourself to me. Now help me subject them to gradual, torturous pain."

Dib rolled his eyes. "That was pretty much the plan." He tucked the last pudding balloon into a hole in the tree trunk, along with the rest of their stash. He got to his feet and balanced on the tree limb, steadying himself against the trunk. He picked a balloon from the hole and loaded it into Zim's makeshift slingshot. "Do you have some kind of, alien thingy, that can calculate the trajectory?"

Zim didn't respond, but a multi-hinged goggle-helmet whirred into place over his eyes, and his jaw jutted in concentration. Finally, he raised a gloved finger. "Ready the doom balloon."

Dib pulled the balloon back. The elastic stretched, and Zim's metal legs bent slightly. Dib had never really looked at the appendages up close. The metal was surprisingly thin for its strength. The left leg had a set of scratches the joint, like bite or claw marks.

"Down," Zim instructed. "And left more."

Dib complied. Through the trees he spotted a couple strolling through the park gates. The guy had a thick neck, and held his arms away from his sides, as if to accommodate enormous biceps -- whether or not the muscles actually existed. He was the kind of guy who liked to play amateur chiropractor on Dib at lunch hour. And the girl hung off him like an old woman on a walker. Dib suddenly wished there _were _time-release explosives in the balloons. He nearly let the balloon fly that instant, but Zim was quacking more commands. "Left more. More! Up."

Finally, Zim approved the angle. Down on the path, thick-necked guy stared down the girl's shirt as she talked. Dib released the balloon, and a second later, the guy's head was coated in pistachio pudding. He reeled away from the girl, tripped, and landed on his ass. Before Dib could stop himself, he yelled, "Ha!"

Beside him, Zim cackled. "Foolish Earth-thing! Enjoy your explosion, care of _Zim_!" He paused. "And eh, the Dib too. But mostly Zim."

Dib tried to dampen the laughter bubbling up. Sure, the guy looked like a jerk. It didn't mean he deserved -- well, the point was that Dib was only _pretending _to be on Zim's side. He didn't actually think preying on other humans was funny.

Down on the path, the girl reached down to help the guy up, and he slapped her hand away and hollered in her face. The girl straightened and cocked a hip. She turned away from him, crossed her arms and pointed her nose skyward, apparently no longer willing to help Thick Neck up. He struggled to his feet and continued to yell at her. Dib considered hitting him with a second helping of pistachio. Finally the girl turned back to her green-splattered boy --and smacked him in the face with her purse.

Dib couldn't take it any more. He burst out laughing. Beside him, Zim had been gurgling his gross pre-laugh, "Hehh. Hyeeh-hehh." As Dib lost it, Zim cackled louder, and soon they were both struggling for balance on the tree limb, breathless with laughter. Zim dug his lower spider legs into the tree; Dib leaned on him, gripping his dress-thing around the shoulders.

Once the girl had given the guy a decent purse-whipping and stalked off down the path, their laughter slowed to the occasional snicker. Then a trio of Hi Skool girls, all dressed the same and all with cell phones clapped to their right ears, strolled through the park gate. At Zim's instruction, Dib reloaded the slingshot. They got two of the three targets before the girls ran screaming off the path. One got her pointy heel stuck in a root knot, panicked, and left the shoe behind.

The boys worked their way through a dozen pudding balloons before a victim -- a suited, big-chinned man shouting into a wireless headset -- caught sight of them and they were forced to retreat. Zim commandeered another vehicle -- this time a young-looking soccer-mom type in a red mini-van -- for their getaway. After some aimless wandering (and bickering over how to spend the rest of their illicit free time) Dib pointed them up to the bluffs overlooking the city.

They found the spot he was aiming for: a cliff-edge patch of grass at the dead end of a road. A wooden fence ran along the edge, but the slats were far enough apart to climb through. They did so, and sat on the lip of grass between the fence and a sheer drop. It was just wide enough to sit on with their legs hanging over the edge – and sloped, so there was an added thrill in feeling like they would slide right off. Dib had picked it on a whim, but now that they were here he supposed it was also a gesture of trust. Not that Zim was sharp enough to pick up on anything that subtle.

Zim peered down at the city, probably picturing it in flames, or with big triangle flags at every street corner declaring, "Property of ZIM!"

The alien spoke up. "Where is this hook you promised me?"

Dib leaned back and rested his shoulders on the fence. "What?"

"You said we were going to do something 'hooky.'"

Dib snorted. "That just means skipping Skool, Zim."

Zim paused. "I knew that. For I am so very--"

"Zim, if you say 'normal' I'm going back to trying to kill you. I _know _you're an alien, remember?" Dib idly picked at grass blades. "And your wig is on crooked."

Zim pointedly didn't adjust it. The breeze picked up, and the hairs on the years-old wig didn't even move. Dib made a face. He closed his eyes and willed himself to relax, savouring the buffeting air, the spice-rack smell of the grass and dry dirt. The sun warmed half of his face, glowing red through his right eyelid, but strangely not his left. It took him a moment to realize Zim was blocking the rest of his light – the alien's shadow fell over his left half.

They settled into a silence that would have been awkward if Dib hadn't been concentrating on ramping down his earlier adrenaline, and if Zim had any concept of awkwardness at all. Soon the rest of Dib's face cooled, and the light dimmed. He cracked an eye open; across the city the sun had dropped behind the hills. Zim lay back against the fence, matching Dib's pose.

In a flash of creative inspiration, Dib crept a hand over Zim's. _That's a couple thing, right? Something you're supposed to do?_

Zim's glove was slick like fake leather, and unnervingly cold. At least it wasn't as bad as kissing him. Dib threaded his fingers between Zim's -- an awkward fit, considering Zim only had two and a thumb -- and gave a hesitant squeeze. Zim squinted up at him, and Dib wondered why he even bothered with something like hand-holding. It wasn't like Zim knew anything about human dating rituals, other than whatever questionable clips his house computer showed him. Dib started to pull his hand back -- and Zim held on. He still glared at Dib, but he wouldn't relinquish the hand.

Dib shrugged and lay back again. He sat there on a cliff-lip, holding hands with an alien and feeling alarmingly at ease with it.

--

_That's a couple thing, right? Something you're supposed to do?_

Johnny C., not much of a paranormal research agent these days, stood on a cliff-edge at the dead end of a road and wrung his hands on the fenceposts. He leaned forward so the cross-slat dug into his torso under his ribs. Below him hung a grassy lip, and a steep drop. He came up this cliff before with Devi, and he came up by himself, and not once did this other old memory surface. What was with that?

_Something you're supposed to_

Well this all made absolutely no sense. But the alien thing in his head did look a lot like the small Russian. If this memory trip ended with him wearing fuzzy hats and discovering all his life's answers in The Communist Manifesto, Johnny decided he would try out the whole suicide thing again.

--

That night Dib arrived home fully, and naively, prepared to defend his lateness and absence from school. Of course, the only one home at the Membrane house was his sister, and when he offered his excuses to her, she pretended she'd forgotten his name, and threw a couple of empty DVD boxes at him for good measure.

He retreated to his room and settled in front of his computer. A received-mail message sat on his desktop. He clicked it, and let out a victory whoop: the Eyeballs had accepted his latest alias. Agent Johnny C. could begin pestering his fellow paranormal enthusiasts at his discretion.

Dib opened up the surveillance feed from Zim's base. The alien either hadn't reached the house yet, or he was still upstairs peeling Gir off the wall; the room was empty, and silent except for the occasional beep or click from the console.

A year or two back, Dib had finally succeeded in recording the feed and sending it off to the Swollen Eyeballs – only to have them dismiss it as a fake. A fake! The most paranoid, paranormal-minded organization in the world thought Dib – or rather, Agent Tooms – had faked alien footage. They said that Zim appeared "too human… most likely a small man in costume." Dib tried explaining the infused human DNA; the Eyeballs claimed he was now contradicting himself, and while extraterrestrial lifeforms were plausible enough, alien human hybrids arising from botched bologna DNA infusion were pure fantastical hoo-hah.

It may not have helped that this came after six months of Agent Tooms "crying wolf" on a particularly elusive set of yard faeries. The Eyeballs ejected Tooms over the video footage and Dib was left searching for yet another handle and hairstyle.

Still, Dib recorded the surveillance feed when he could. Tonight he would wait until Zim actually showed up, tape some footage, and forward it to the Swollen Eyeballs as Agent Johnny C. Hopefully it had been long enough since his last Zim tape that they wouldn't connect him with his previous aliases.

Dib slouched down in his chair and let out a breath. _Hopefully. _He mused aloud: "Yeah right. When have you ever had that kind of luck?"

An hour passed, and Zim still hadn't come onscreen. Dib muttered, "See what I mean about luck?"

Another half hour went by, and Dib was nearly asleep in his chair. He forced himself to sit up and, without thinking about what he was doing, connected to the Swollen Eyeballs.

_But I don't have anything to show them!_

Out loud he said, "Let's try something different for once."

Not that he had any clue what that "something different" would be.

Agent Dark Booty's hunched figure appeared onscreen and squinted at "Agent Johnny C." He rasped, "Welcome. Have you got anything of interest for us?"

Dib was still fitting an earpiece into his left ear, to keep track of the voice distortion -- to make sure he wasn't completely garbled, or not masked enough. With no idea what he intended to say next, he opened his mouth. "I don't have anything prepared yet. Right now I'm looking for information. To corroborate some of my findings. Can you do that for me?" Dib's own voice in the earpiece was nasal and harsh. Between that and the fact that this was 100 on-the-fly, it was like listening to someone else entirely.

Agent Dark Booty glared, and for a second it seemed he would refuse. He asked, "What information, exactly?"

"Naturally occurring edible ore. Specifically, chocolate. I've heard rumours of something mineable in the Earth's crust. They call it 'Choconium.'"

Dark Booty's eyebrows rose. "There are reports of this phenomenon, but nothing well-documented. It is not exactly a high priority."

Dib leaned in close to the monitor. "It might just become one."

"Hm." Dark Booty's eyes narrowed.

"I'll be able to tell you more once I've seen those reports."

"Very well," said Dark Booty. He looked to the bottom of his screen for a moment, then back up. "I have transferred the documents to you. Good luck in your research, Agent Johnny C."

"Thank you, Agent Dark Booty."

The communication ended, and Dib settled in for a long night of reading about Zim's precious Choconium.

--

Around three o'clock in the morning, Dib finished reading. He rubbed his eyes behind his glasses. Dark Booty wasn't kidding about "nothing well-documented." Half the reports were suspiciously hallucinatory accounts of lickable rocks and dirt like cheesecake crust. Nothing was cited, and no two reports were connected; just a series of individual accounts by people who sounded crackpot, even to Dib.

There were, however, some consistent details between reports: witnesses never found deposits that reached the surface – some amount of blasting or digging was always involved; the most plausible sounding deposits had all appeared in the mountains along the Northwest coast of North America, or in the Sierra Nevada mountains in Spain. Other than that, most of the information was contradictory or just plain confusing.

Dib stopped poking his eyeball and stared at the surveillance feed, still open onscreen. Zim had finally shown up, an hour or two ago. He logged something on the console, then received a warning from the house computer that Gir was attempting to take the mutant chinchilla out for swing dancing. Zim had screamed and run for the transport tube.

Dib trailed his finger on the monitor, over the bright red of Zim's base walls. "Zim hasn't collected his own information on Choconium yet." _Thanks to some darn good acting on my part. _"Those other, taller aliens really wanted it though. If they talk him into investigating he might actually find something."

Dib scratched his upper lip and paged through the accounts of chocolate rock. An idea began to form.


	5. Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day

**NOTES**: Oh look, another update. And a longer one, too. Will wonders never cease?

This chapter is all about plot-seeding. For the arc I have in mind, I need three plots set up, and until now I've only established one. _Oh hey look technical stuff that no one cares about. _

The chapter also takes advantage of a convenient aspect of Zim-verse worldrules: all bit-characters will inevitably be assholes.

Chab suggesting that the girls make out to was totally the product of watching too much Black Books. And the façade of Mrs. Lovett's Pie Shop was because we were watching Sweeney Todd while I drafted. Much love and credit to both of these creative sources.

Thank you to everyone reading and everyone commenting and also to people doing both. You, the steadfast Zim and ZADR fans, keep my inspiration oiled and chugging. That, and the dozen boxes of unlabeled wine currently stored in my bedroom.

**WARNINGS**: Joke overextension (re: use of the word "suck"); budding misanthropy; the word "purple" as a verb; continued gratuitous em-dash use; criticism of North American public schools; repressed dominance fetish; extended interspecies lip-touching.

--

**Chapter Four: TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO-GOOD, VERY BAD DAY**

The Tallest had recently been introduced to a new, intensely unnerving state of being: hoping to hear from Zim. Of course, as far as Red could tell, Purple still thought they blocked 75 percent of Zim's transmissions just because Zim was annoying.

He _was _annoying, but Red blocked the calls because he didn't want the other Irkens to get a good look at Zim. Somehow that brain-damaged little Irken had found a way to, to _tallify _himself. It was hard to get an accurate height from the video feed, but Red estimated he was at least three segments tall – only half a segment less than himself and Purple. If Zim returned to Irk at that height, he could gain real political power.

However, Zim hadn't returned to Irk. In fact, he didn't even seem to notice his own height, or its potential advantages. No, Zim just kept on concocting and bungling plans to conquer his pet planet, Earth. Red figured it kept him busy, and it kept him away from Irk.

Of course, now there was the matter of Choconium. Purple had wanted to set course for Earth the second he heard the rumour of the precious Snack Ore, but Red reminded him how reliable any information from Zim was. In the meantime, they oversaw the downfall and terraforming of planet Tront-B, and Red wracked his brain for a way to invade Earth and keep Zim hidden from the Irken troops – without Zim catching on.

Purple sucked noisily on a peanut butter milkshake and stared out the observation window. On the planet below, giant metal cubes peeled off the planet's surface in strips. "I thought we were going to make Cornerstoria-5 on this one. There isn't a bulk candy outpost in sectors. We need more candy frogs!"

Red hovered closer to the window. "This is a new idea: an entire planet to manufacture fountain soda syrup for the Foodcourtia planets."

"Oh." Purple gnawed on his straw. "That's good too."

One of the high-collared navigation class Irkens called out, "My Tallest! Incoming transmission from Earth."

Even a week earlier, Red would have instructed them to respond with stock footage of himself and Purple staring at the screen with blank looks and slack jaws. Now he zipped to the high-collared Irken and commanded him to bring up Zim's call on the small console screen.

The screen stayed blank. The navigation class Irken tapped a gloved hand on the status read screen, console right. "Sir. He seems to be transmitting only audio."

Red let out a breath. "Good. Okay. Put him up on the main monitor."

At the front of the control room, the main screen flickered from its default magenta to white, then black, and the speakers crackled. Red hovered back to the bridge platform, and joined Purple in front of the screen.

Purple cocked his head. "Zim? Did you plunge the Earth into eternal darkness? Because that's not what you were supposed to do." He turned to Red. "It's going to be hard to mine the Choconium if we can't see anything."

A pause, then Zim said. "No. My computer's – camera, broke."

"Oh," said Purple.

"Do you have anything for us?" Red asked.

Another pause. Then: "I followed up on the rumours. They humans' reports are lies. They have no Choconium."

Red scratched his chin. "They don't?"

"No Choconium," Zim repeated. "The rumour came from the North West of North America. The man who found the Choconium actually found normal dirt and ate it. He was under the influence of an Earth drug called mar-i-want-a."

Purple deflated so thoroughly he nearly dropped his milkshake. Red slumped too, though less dramatically. He sighed. "Alright Zim. That will be all. Go away now." He signalled to the high-collared Irken to cut off the communication before Zim could squeeze in another "My Tallest!"

Puple finished off his shake and tossed it over his shoulder. A janitorial class Irken immediately scuttled in and carried the cup off. Purple said, "Well. At least we can go back to ignoring Zim."

"Yes." Red patted his co-ruler's shoulder. "How about we go terraform a new Cornerstoria planet. Would that be fun?"

"Yeah." Purple straightened. "Yeah. Let's do that. What planet did we just conquer?"

One of the navigation class Irken called out, "Flaf, in sector M-510."

"Take us there," said Red. "And put in an order for nine trillion sour cherry candies." He floated over to the Irken who had routed Zim's transmission. Red leaned in close and said, "Save me a record of that call. And don't tell anyone you did it, or I'll have you fired. Into space."

The Irken shivered. "Yes, sir."

--

Dib rocked back in his chair and stretched. It actually worked! The hardest part was cutting together the sound clips to make Zim say the word "marijuana." And he was sure the Tallest would ask about the big, conspicuous pauses at the beginning of each response – he could only arrange the clips so fast. For the leaders of an entire race, the tall Irkens weren't very smart. Though, if human leaders were any model, Dib shouldn't have been surprised.

The "report" should throw the aliens off the scent for awhile. With any luck, permanently, but he wasn't counting on it. And without them pestering Zim about Choconium, there was a decent chance Zim would forget about it. Especially with the added distraction of – Dib twitched – his new "love pig."

He really wished Zim would stop calling him that. Especially in public.

--

That week, skool reminded Dib that being the only person stalling the destruction of the planet did not exempt him from the day-to-day madness of Hi Skool.

Tuesday afternoon, for example. The Biology teacher, Mr. Flagg, opened the unit on plant systems with a hands-on activity: he divided the class into groups of four and had them tape straws together into longer and longer lengths of _super-_straw. At two straws and four straws, Mr. Flagg instructed them to place one end of the elongated straw into a beaker of water, and try to suck the liquid up from the opposite end.

At four straws, Dib barely had the lung-strength to draw a mouthful of water. At six, Dib couldn't get any water at all – although curiously, the long-nailed girl in his group had no problem with eight and even nine straws. The other girl and boy in the group had a good snicker at that.

Mr. Flagg adjusted his goggles on his forehead, pushed his glasses up his nose and paced between the lab benches. He peered at the students' straw constructions. "You see, don't you, how difficult it is to draw water up even one or two feet." He stopped, snapped his feet together and clasped his hands behind his back, an almost military pose. "Trees must draw water up _hundreds_ of feet. Maybe now you appreciate the effort they make."

The broad-shouldered boy in Dib's group snorted. "So like, you're saying trees _suck hard._"

All the girls within a three-table radius burst into giggles.

"Oh yeah." Dib rolled his eyes. "That's hilarious."

The boy jabbed his finger in Dib's chest, right in the solar plexus. "It is hilarious! And you suck more than trees!"

The girls launched into an encore of giggles. Dib dropped his face to the lab bench and worked on remembering how to inhale.

There came a roar and smattering of applause from the other side of the classroom. Dib rolled his head to see what the fuss was about. Amid the cheering crowd stood Zim, on top of a lab bench, sucking the end of a straw attached to – Dib counted – twelve other straws. Thirteen in total. The super-straw was so long, the beaker of water had to sit on the floor beside the lab bench. The water raced up the straw to Zim's mouth, where it hissed and smoked. Zim quickly spat it out, grimaced, and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

_That's stupid. Why does he keep doing it if it burns him?_

"Who cares?" Dib mumbled into the table. "If he hurts himself, it saves you the trouble."

_Since when is it about hurting him? I thought we wanted to capture him so he won't take over Earth._

"He's an evil alien, remember? Since when are you all about being nice?"

The broad-shouldered, scruff-chinned boy grabbed the back of Dib's head, yanked it back and slammed it down on the tabletop. Spots floated in front of Dib's eyes and his hearing went muffled, like sound through water.

The boy said, "Stop talking to yourself. Freak."

Dib's senses gradually returned. Across the room, Zim was yelling. "Zim's mighty internal organs best yours! I could drink through tubes _ten times _this length!"

"Yeah," yelled a girl in Zim's group. "Zim sucks more than anyone here!"

The manicured girl in Dib's group stood up and snapped her fingers (Dib couldn't figure out how she did that with nails that long). "Oh yeah? Well I suck more than Zim."

"Lies!" screeched Zim. "Group piggies! Make me the longest straw in the world! I will show them who sucks more."

Zim's groupmates looked at each other, then back up at him.

Zim narrowed his eyes. "If you do this, I will replace all your internal organs with bundles of Earth-monies."

The groupmates threw their arms in the air, cheered and carried Zim out the door, along with a dozen boxes of straws and three rolls of tape.

The manicured girl whirled on her teammates. "We have to make a longer straw. Now!"

The other girl wrung her hands – each decked with at least two rings per finger – and cringed. "But Azy, you could only do nine. Did you see how many—"

Azy thrust her face so close to the girl's, she could have bitten off her nose. "I said. Make me a longer straw."

"Yes'm," squeaked the girl.

The boy cleared his throat. "And uh, since that's settled, why don't you two kiss and make up?"

Azy glared at him. "Why don't you shut up, Chab, and make me something longer than three inches. If you know what that looks like." She turned to Dib. "You too, freak boy. Try not to wig out and stick the straws anywhere they're not supposed to go."

She herded them out of the classroom. Mr. Flagg poked his head out after them. "Very good! Bonus marks to both groups for initiative. Remember to think of the trees!"

The biology classroom was on the eighth floor of the skool; both Dib's group and Zim's decided to run their super-straws down the stairwells, Dib's at the north end of the building, Zim's at the south. Half an hour in, Dib stood on the landing between the seventh and sixth floors, winding layers of electrical tape around the joint between two straws.

Chab called down from the flight above. "Freak! You out of straws yet?"

"Almost," Dib called back. "Hey, why am I the only one doing this?"

Chab shrugged, and tossed down a box of straws. It smacked Dib on his generous forehead and burst open, scattering straws all over the landing. The box managed to hit the exact spot on Dib's head already bruised from Chab beating it against the lab bench. His vision blurred from the sting.

"Ow." He rubbed his forehead, and called up to Chab, "What was that for?"

"Quickest way to the get the box down there." Chab smirked. "And for being a freak. Freak."

Dib knelt down to gather up the straws. "Oh well. It's not the worst thing I've been called." Something else smacked into the back of Dib's head, sending him sprawling. A roll of electrical tape wobbled across the landing and disappeared down the stairs. This time Dib just groaned, picked himself up, and kept gathering the straws.

_These are the people I'm saving from Zim?_

He grimaced. "Don't start that."

In another twenty minutes, Dib stood on the fourth floor landing, taping on the final straw. Above him, Azy argued with Chab and the other girl. They insisted that a four-story straw was way out of her range; she insisted that they were both unsanitary sub-humans with questionable lineage.

Dib yelled up the stairwell, "Hey! It's ready."

Azy called back. "Hold on, freakboy! You need the water."

A water bottle rocketed down the stairwell and narrowly missed Dib's head. He grinned, sniffed and bent down to pick the bottle up – and something else hit the back of his head, already bruised from the roll of tape.

"This is getting old." He picked up the second object: an egg-shaped bottle of purple food dye.

Azy yelled, "Put the food colour in the water. That way even if I don't get it all the way up, the dye will show how far I made it." She huffed. "I'll bet that Zim kid didn't think of that."

Dib squeezed a dozen drops of colour into the water bottle, shook it up and lowered the end of the straw inside. On his signal, Azy began to suck. He watched as the water crept up six of the straws, then nine – ten – the purple made it halfway up the eleventh straw before Azy gave up. She exhaled with a roar, and the water flowed back down into the bottle.

"See?" said the other girl. "Told yeh so."

"Shut up," said Azy. She paused for a moment, then made a second attempt.

This time the water made it to the twelfth straw, and an inch up the thirteenth. There it paused. Up on the eighth floor, the girl and Chab taunted Azy. They ran out of jeers and resorted to chanting, "Suck hard! Suck hard!"

Finally, Azy gave a mumbled growl of frustration and yanked the straw upward, out of the bottle. Then she gave up. The purple water drained out of the straw, and straight into Dib's face. It poured down his shirt, his pants, over his shoes and splashed across the floor, a huge purple stain. He grasped at the super-straw in a vain attempt to stick it back in the bottle. Instead he managed to snap the bottom three straws off, and pull the rest out of Azy's hands. Four storeys of straws and tape crumbled and fell on Dib. He lost his balance and tumbled to the floor in heap of plastic tubes, tape, and purple.

For a moment he sat there and stared at his purple-soaked hands. Footsteps thundered down the stairs and soon his groupmates appeared on the next landing, with Mr. Flagg in tow.

Azy pointed at Dib. "See?" she said. "I would have had it, but the freak kid wrecked everything."

Mr. Flagg shook his head gravely. The bobbing of his electric-shock hair did nothing to dampen the effect. "Mr. Membrane, you haven't learned much at all about trees, have you?"

Dib's teammates disappeared back up the stairs.

Mr. Flagg hovered over Dib and crossed his arms. "Time to clean up this mess, Mr. Membrane. I am revoking your bonus marks."

"What?" Dib waved his arms. "For what?"

"Sabotaging an experiment," said Mr. Flagg. "Also for irreversibly and maliciously purpling school property." He peered over his glasses. "Nothing removes food dye from floor tile, Mr. Membrane."

Mr. Flagg spun on his heel and strode away, back up the stairs to the eighth floor. Dib extracted himself from the pile of purple debris and stumbled out into the hall in search of a bathroom.

On the way, he passed the South stairwell. Applause and faint cheering came from inside. Despite his need for a rinse, Dib ventured into the stairwell. A super-straw rand down past the landing to – Dib peeked over the edge – all the way down to the first floor. As Dib stood there, there straw shuddered, and a gush of green liquid bolted up it. A second later, cheering erupted from above.

Dib made his way up the stairs. At the top floor, half the first flight of steps was blocked by an audience that included not only the Biology class, but a number of kids Dib didn't recognize, some of them wearing gym class pinnies.

In the middle of the crowd stood, once again, Zim, now drinking down gulps of green liquid, sucked all the way up from the bottom floor. He took a final gulp and released the straw. Zim held his arms up and grinned.

The crowd went nuts. Someone yelled, "Eight floors! And he did it twice!" Someone else, this one with a curiously deep voice, followed with, "Aw yeah! Zim _sucks_!"

"Yes," said Zim. "Yes I do." He spotted Dib and cocked his head, still with that obnoxious victory grin. "Stink-boy. Has the shame of defeat caused your skin to change colour?" He scratched his head. "I didn't know it did that."

Dib glared at him. He pushed past the crows and into the hallway. He needed his bag, and he still needed a sink and some soap. And maybe some ice for his head, which was beginning to throb from his teammates' abuse.

--

The Hi Skool was, for the most part, built like a Jenga stack – tall, square and with questionable structural integrity. On the bottom two floors, the gymnasium sprouted out the back of the building like a tail, or big, cubical tumour. On the end of the gymnasium was the Annex: three classrooms linked by a short hallway. The hall also had access to the gymnasium stage, and it had about two dozen lockers.

Dib's locker was, naturally, out in the Annex, and it seemed to be there every year. He was beginning to suspect that some conspiracy of teachers decided, upon his enrolment, that it would be best to isolate Dib from the rest of the student population, so his vast knowledge of the paranormal and the covert would not pass on. That, or someone really enjoyed watching him walk across an entire outdoor parking lot and up the rickety stairs to the second floor of the Annex, inevitably in the pouring rain.

Tuesday lunch hour, Dib ended up at his locker, soaked, still dyed purple, bruised both from his classmates and a sudden barrage of hail, and holding the remains of his history textbook, which he had used as a makeshift umbrella. It wasn't even technically _his _history textbook – he shared it with Nob Blondell: Dib got it Tuesdays and Thursdays; Nob had it Monday-Wednesday-Friday; they alternated weekends. The history department estimated that they could afford full sets of textbooks in – optimistically – less than a decade.

Anyway. Nob was probably going to set Dib on fire now.

"The Dib!" screeched Zim from behind him. Dib hadn't even heard him approach.

Dib shoved the damp wad of paper that used to be _History and You (And Lots of Other, More Important People) _onto the top shelf of his locker. "What is it, Zim?" He was in no mood to play Love Pig Dib. In fact, he was fantasizing about sticking leftover straws in Zim's stupid buggy eyes.

"Are you not impressed and awed by my show of superior biology?" Zim asked. "Praise my victory!"

Dib rested his forehead on the cold metal edge of the locker shelf. "Not really, Zim."

Zim was silent for a moment. Dib could almost hear the hamster wheel in his head squeaking. Finally he said, "Hey, you know how I got around the problem with your painful Earth liquid of _doom_?" He didn't wait for Dib to respond. "I replaced it with a standard Irken nutrition supplement. That's why it was green. Such genius am I!"

Dib rolled over so his back pressed against the ridged locker doors. He gave Zim a flat look.

Zim fisted his hands on his hips and puffed out his chest. "You must be speechless with awe. You'll probably want to congratulate me." He leaned close. "Maybe by going into a room and doing that mouthy-thin—"

Dib slapped his hand over Zim's mouth. A cluster of students sat at the end of the Annex hallway eating their lunch, and any number could be hanging around inside the open-doored classrooms. Zim struggled and mumbled against his hand. He stuck his weird tubular tongue out and licked the palm, and Dib's teeth audibly snapped together. He spotted a door across the hallway – the entrance to the gymnasium stage. Good enough.

"Well Zim, I'm going to hit you now." Dib yelled down the hall. "Hit you with props. You evil alien monster!" He dashed across the hall, shoved Zim through the door, followed, and slammed it shut behind them.

Inside it was pitch dark. Dib patted the wall beside the door in search of a lightswitch. He gave up, flung his hands in the air and waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark.

Zim's hand wrapped around Dib's arm. "Good enough! Now commence with the mouth-touchy."

Dib shook his hand off. "I don't feel like it right now. I put you in here so you wouldn't say something stupid in front of the other kids." By now Dib could see a faint glow to his left and his right. They were in the closet-sized backstage area. A wall blocked them from the main stage, with curtain-covered entrances on either end.

He ducked through the entrance on the left, emerging onto the stage. At the moment it was closed off from the rest of the gym by the ceiling-high sliding doors at the front. The space was crammed with props, set backdrops (Dib nearly knocked over a façade of Mrs. Lovett's Meat Pie Shop) and some of the larger sports equipment – balance beams, a pommel horse, and big blue high-jump mats.

Zim followed him out. "You refuse? You may not refuse Zim!"

Dib flung himself onto one of the high jump mats and lay there, spread eagle on his back, sinking into the blue squishy cube. "It doesn't work that way. If you annoy me too much I don't – _reciprocate _– any more. Then you have to wait until I do. Or do something to make me less annoyed."

Zim scoffed. "Zim does not approve of your _rules._"

"Well too bad," said Dib. "Then no more kissing."

That shut Zim up. For a minute he actually seemed to pause. Then, from the sound of it, he started pacing back and forth on the strip of cleared floor in front of the sliding doors.

Just when Dib thought he'd give up and leave, Zim leapt onto the high jump mat beside him. The impact raised Dib out of the blue fabric for an instant. As he sunk back in, he sat up and glared at Zim.

"Are you not-annoyed yet, Stinkbeast?" Zim's voice was – it took Dib a second to place the tone, as he'd never heard it from the alien before – it was _hesitant. _

"It's been like a minute, Zim. It takes longer than that."

Zim tilted his head and closed one eyes, musing. "Do humans like snacks? I will deliver you snacks! Then you will be receptive to mouth-thing-ing."

Snacks – were all Irkens obsessed with junk food? Tak's plan involved offering snacks to their leaders. The corner of Dib's mouth twitched. Snacks were a fare fit for their leaders, and now Zim was offering a snack tribute to _him. _The thought made his bruises hurt less. And that tone in Zim's voice! It hadn't gone away. It had in fact amplified, and now Zim's eyes widened, like a puppy whining for scraps. Zim was bargaining for a chance to kiss Dib again. Zim was nearly _begging._

The pain in Dib's head faded and energy thrilled up from his core. Maybe today wasn't so bad. In fact, pushy Azy and hitty-fists Chab didn't seem all that infuriating any more. Who cared? He was single-handedly saving the world from invasion _and _he had his lifelong nemesis at his mercy. And how far could he take that? What, with the right manoeuvring, could he convince Zim to do? Hand over alien technology? Appear on video without his contacts and wig?

Dib sighed. The tension went out of his shoulders. "Fine. I'll do it, this time. Just don't make me look like an idiot like that again, okay?"

"Like what?"

"You know. With the straws and the oh never mind—"

Before he could think too hard about it (and risk screaming or vomiting) he dipped and tilted his head, and kissed Zim. His lips were still weird and rubbery, but at lest this time they were warmer. Dib let it go for longer. If he fed Zim just this little bit more, maybe he'd hook the alien that much harder. And anyway, he didn't feel nauseous yet.

Dib might have even lost track of time, a little. Eventually he drew back and caught his breath. Zim's eyes were half-closed over his contacts, and his shoulders hunched forward, toward Dib. The alien swallowed – a nervous move, and it made Dib's feet feel strange. It gave him the urge to kiss Zim again, to see what other signs of weakness he could produce.

So he did. He pressed his mouth to Zim's and this time Zim grabbed his shoulders and tried to tug him closer. Dib wouldn't budge, but he moved his hands to the sides of Zim's face, ostensibly to keep him from moving and squirming around. Zim leaned into him, and made a creaking, clicking sound in his throat, like an un-oiled door. It made Dib think of purring cats. He was suddenly curious: did that sound come from vocal cords? Did Zim _have _vocal cords? If Zim opened his mouth right now, would the clicking get louder?

Dib opened his mouth enough to stick his tongue out. He nudged the tip between Zim's lips until the alien's mouth opened. The sound didn't change. He didn't feel the vibration in Zim's tongue like he'd half-expected. He slid his hands down the sides of Zim's neck – not coming from there either. His hands continued down to Zim's chest and he hardly noticed when Zim hiccupped a smaller, squeaky noise and arched, pressing against Dib's palms.

Lower on Zim's chest, where ribs would be on a human, that felt closer. He slid his hands around behind Zim's back and finally found the source: halfway down, where the last ribs should be, Zim was firm but pressable like cartilage, and he buzzed with that clicking, creaky noise. Weird.

Zim took the hands on his back the wrong way and he shifted closer. Dib let him. He was distracted by the creaking, and how it faded when Zim moved. One of them or both of them relaxed too much and they lay back on the mats, sunk into one big divot, side-to-side and attached at the mouth.

Out in the gym, behind the giant sliding doors, a class full of sneakered feet rumble-squeaked out onto the floor. Metal ball bins _ting_ed and soon basketballs thundered. The sound and bright gym light squeezed through the seam between the two sliding doors and fell across Dib and Zim, quietly making out on the high jump mats.

--

Dib figured he'd at least try to make it to his final class. Hell, why not? He and Zim left the stage through separate doors and met back up in the skool's main building. He walked with Zim up to Geology on the third floor, then continued up to the sixth for Math. On his way, at least half a dozen kids asked about or snarked at his purpled skin. Heavy-limbed and horrifyingly content with the taste of alien tongue still on the roof of his mouth, Dib gave the same response to every comment.

"It's a skin condition."


	6. Spooky and Skin Condition Stay the Night

**NOTES: **Jeezy Chreezy, it's a seven thousand word chapter. And if I can get these notes done quickly, it'll even update on a Tuesday. That's my goal now – Tuesday means _Tuesday Means UFOs. _

You know what else is convenient about the Zimverse? Everything advanced can be explained away as "Vortian technology." Also, I'm pretty sure this chapter gives away my bizarre antenna fixation. It's like the fact that I focus on characters' hands. I don't even _have _a hand fetish.

Ten points to whoever gets the Monty Python reference later on.

Thankyou so much to everyone who commented on the last chapter. I'm thrilled to hear that the things I'm aiming for are working so far. For those who are waiting for more Nny connections: I realize they're sparse in this chapter, but sit tight. It'll come in more during the second plot arc, which should start in the next chapter or two.

Oh yeah, and I was going to work some implied RAPR into this chapter, until I realized that this story's worldrules don't allow for fullblood Irken romance. I guess if you tilt your head it's there. Maybe they cuddle and eat licorice ropes from opposite ends, Lady and the Tramp style.

**WARNINGS: **For once, actual warnings. This chapter contains references to interspecies foolings-about between two male-shaped characters. There is nothing graphically porntastic, but there's no way around it: here there be foreplay. Enjoy.

--

**Chapter Five: SPOOKY AND SKIN CONDITION STAY THE NIGHT**

_I had visions, I was in them  
I was looking into the mirror  
To see a little bit clearer  
The rottenness and evil in me_

_Fingertips have memories  
Mine can't forget the curves of your body_

_I'm not sick, but I'm not well._

Harvey Danger – Flagpole Sitta

Halfway through Math class, the horrible, heavy feeling faded enough for Dib to think clearly again. This was unfortunate for Dib. A coil of disgust began to curl and tighten in his stomach. He left the classroom last so no one would see him walk with a stiff hip – he had a crick in it from lying in an awkward position for nearly and hour. Someone might know – from the storage-space dust on his jacket or the lump on his bottom lip, where Zim had the bright idea to bite down.

He avoided the bus and speed-walked home, where he closed himself in his bedroom, sat in his desk chair and tucked his knees up to his chest. For the next seven hours he sat and stared at his blank computer monitor, furiously not-thinking.

Finally, around midnight, he unfolded himself from the chair, stood in front of the desk until he'd mastered standing and not-thinking at the same time, and paced across the room to the window at the foot of his bed. He gripped the windowsill and peered through the glass. He bent and twisted to look up, to the patch of clear sky between his house and the neighbours'. From here he could only spot the brightest couple stars; between the streetlights, the soccer fields down the street, and the LCD gravestones at the cemetery, the neighbourhood was too bright to stargaze. Sometimes he had a decent shot from the roof. Usually the view relaxed him, or energized him. Now it reminded him he'd spent the afternoon sucking face with an alien.

He ran a hand through his hair. In his reflection in the window, the scythe-shape down this middle of his head parted, and fell into the two-pronged style he'd been wearing as Agent Johnny C.

"It's disgusting, you know," he said to himself.

_I know._

"He's the enemy. He's a threat to the whole human race. Especially now that his leaders are interested in Earth."

_And this was the plan to distract him._

"Distracting him means throwing him scraps, not feeding him a full-course meal." Dib's reflection grimaced. "That wasn't duty back there. Or it was duty for the first minute. You enjoyed it."

He shut his eyes and shook his head.

"You did. There's no way around that."

_I don't know what happened! I got caught up in the moment. _He opened his eyes and straightened. _The sound thing was weird. I was investigating a possible species weakness._

"Of course. It was in the name of science."

_It was._

"Of course." His reflection narrowed its eyes and gave a sardonic grin.

_I'm not going to do it again, that's for sure._

His reflection curled its lip. "Tragically, you'll have to. Unless you intend to blow the whole plan. I'll need more time to figure out this Choconium business."

_But it's gross!_

"Yes it is. Try to remember that next time you stick your tongue in his mouth." His reflection made a gagging face. "He's not even human."

Dib turned away from the window and sat on the end of his bed. Gradually he lay back. Back to not-thinking. He did not think well into the night, and through until morning. He didn't sleep, either.

--

For the first few years of the Tallests' reign, Red and Purple had shared quarters. At first it was out of necessity: theirs was only the second time in Irken history that two Irkens had grown to the exact same superior height – and the first time was over six hundred years ago. The luxurious quarters reserved for the leader of the empire were just that: reserved for _the _leader. Neither Red nor Purple was willing to accept less than his deserved spoils, so they both crossed their arms, growled at each other, and moved into the official Tallest Pad.

They discovered they didn't mind sharing the space, and settled into a comfortable cohabitation. It turned out they had plenty in common, aside from height: a taste for cake donuts; a love of puppets; an irrepressible need to conquer the known universe.

In the past year and a half, however, Red had grown restless. He couldn't tell if Purple was getting dumber and crazier, or if he'd always been that way and Red just never noticed. Purple was happy to sit by and watch as planet after planet fell at the hands of Invaders chosen and programmed by the Control Brains. Occasionally, as in the recent case of Cornerstoria-5, the Control Brains allowed the Tallest to choose and format and purpose for the next planet. But even that had been Red's doing. He approached the Control Brains with the request while Purple was off stacking donuts on the antennae of the janitorial Irkens.

Red had an identical set of quarters constructed on the level below the original, and moved out on his own. He wasn't content to do ceremonial assignings or ceremonial attack launchings, or any ceremonies any more. He wanted to know how the Massive actually operated, and how Operation Impending Doom 2 was projected. He wanted to actually _lead. _

And he wanted to figure out the Zim problem on his own. If the Control Brains knew about his height, they would automatically upgrade his status. Fortunately, they hadn't yet noticed the threat from Zim. They didn't have to field his seven billion calls to the Massive.

Red hovered in his own quarters. He'd snagged a platter of cookies and opaque white nutritional supplement from the servant-staffed dining nook and escaped to the entertainment room. In the original suite the room was equipped with a fridge that ran along the round room's diameter; its top was usually piled with puppets and yo-yos and lengths of brightly coloured string. In Red's own quarters the room had a control panel instead of the fridge. Instead of toys he had file-stacks of data storage chips, backups of the information stored in his computer.

Red hovered in front of the screen and stuffed the last cookie in his mouth. "Show me Purple's main room, the bridge, the entrance to the Level 96 snack vault, and the view of whatever planet we're approaching."

The screen divided into four and brought up the requested views. On the bridge, the navigation Irkens worked with their heads bowed, and two maintenance Irkens poked around inside the exposed back of a console station. At the Level 96 snack vault, the guard Irken who was supposed to be manning the door was absent, and the vault door was open. After a minute, the guard Irken stepped out through the door with a chocolate bar half-stuffed in his mouth. He look left and right, eased the door shut and edged back to his post. The chocolate bar disappeared rapidly into his mouth. Red made a note to have the guard candy-coated and attached to the hull of the Massive for decoration.

He moved to the console along the left side of the room and attached a set of personal audio rings around the bases of his antennae.

"Play transmission from Earth," he commanded. The screen to his left scrolled for an instant, then displayed the blank black of Zim's last call.

The audio played through once. Red ran it a second time. On the bridge he had noticed the pauses before each response, but dismissed it as another failing of Zim's transmission system. And yes, listening to it again, he found that each pause was an actual lack of transmitted audio, and not just dead air on Zim's end.

Red increased the volume and ran the clip again. The pauses had no background noise; that was what gave them away. But the background noise during Zim's speech was strange. It changed in pitch and volume every other second – in fact, it changed every time Zim moved on to a new word. Zim's tone changed too, but it had been weird for the past year or so anyway. Originally Zim had used Vortian technology to fake fluency n Earth languages, but Red suspected he was starting to pick up on it naturally. His Irken speech had picked up odd inflection and accent.

But this, on the recording – this was different. He didn't know what, but Zim was up to something. Red had been on guard from the moment Zim sent a message with no video. What if he'd gotten even _taller_? What if he'd finally caught on to his own advantage, and the possibilities of a planet full of Choconium, and decided to lie to his leaders and build up opposition?

He needed to know what Zim was up to. He removed one of the personal audio rings and ran a program to select an Elite Soldier class Irken with high scores in information retrieval. Three names came up: Soldier Bah, Soldier Drylow, Soldier Yoink. Drylow was the only one who had titled his Tactics Academy entrance essay "Fear, Ruthless Efficiency, and a Fanatical Devotion to My Tallest." Red could probably count on him to agree to bypass the Control Brains' Mission Programming.

He opened the intercom to his head minion. "Find Elite Soldier Drylow and bring him to the nearest free briefing room."

"Yes, my Tallest."

Red closed the link and returned the ring to his right antenna. He slowed down the recording of Zim's transmission, increased the volume and listened to it again.

--

For the rest of the week, Dib did the only thing he could think to: he stayed the hell away from Zim. After all, he'd been right during the whole self-conversation Tuesday night: he didn't want to ruin the diversion plan. At the same time, he found he couldn't look at Zim without flashing to that afternoon on the stage, and getting the sudden urge to crawl out of his own skin and run away to Jupiter.

After years of stalking Zim, he though avoiding him would be as easy as – well, not hunting him down all the time. Not so, apparently. Despite its eight floors, the Hi Skool was just too small. Four times on Wednesday alone, Zim ambushed him and Dib had to make an excuse to leave ("Sorry Zim. I heard my sister's on fire."). It didn't help that Zim was now actively seeking _him _out, to fulfill his disturbing new needs. By Thursday, Dib managed to plant a tracking device on him, so he could keep tabs on the alien and avoid whatever part of the school he was in – except class, which Zim skipped 75 percent of the time anyway.

Tuesday rolled around, and it was once again Group Experiment day in Biology class. Dib was stuck with Chab, Azy and the ring-fingered girl. Mr Flagg, in his infinite creativity, arranged the work groups alphabetically and would not deviate from this plan. And Zim – Zim was not, according to Dib's handheld tracker, anywhere in the school. Maybe today's Experiment would go more quietly.

It was nothing as exciting as the straws: they were all to inspect preserved plant and fibre samples under microscopes and make notes on the structures. There were two microscopes per group; Dib tapped his pen on his notebook and waited for Chab to finish his open-mouthed inspection of a cross-sectioned corn kernel.

Across the table, Azy stared at Dib with narrowed eyes. "Finally got it off, huh freakboy?"

"Huh?" Got what off? Did Zim leave some horrible alien scent, some pheromone behind on him? Did Azy know?

"The purple." She sneered. "I don't want to know what else you've gotten off, believe me."

Before Dib could respond, Chab slid the microscope and sample slides over to him. Dib took his glasses off and rested them on the lab bench while he peered through the microscope lens. It was nothing he hadn't seen – he'd been poking around his dad's lab since he could crawl.

The first sample was a shred of pondweed from the classroom aquarium: irregular-shaped sections like the patches on a soccer ball. The second was a fibre of insulation pulled from the hole a student punched in the wall last semester. The fibre peered up at Dib with a single beady eye, then wriggled its way off the transparent slab. The skool was so old its component parts had gained complex – and harassed – sentience. Dib was not shocked. He had discovered this last year while investigating reports of ghosts in the walls.

He finished his inspection and reached for his glasses. They weren't where he'd set them down. He patted to the left and right. Nothing. His groupmates – or rather, the blobs vaguely shaped like his groupmates – were snickering. Across the table, the blob shaped like Azy bobbled side to side, and something glinted on her face.

"Did you take my glasses?"

Azy snorted. "What glasses?"

Dib tapped the table. "I put them down here." He squinted. "You're wearing them!"

"Uh, no. These are my glasses."

"Since when do you wear glasses?"

Azy scoffed. "Since when do _you _wear glasses?"

"I've always worn them!"

Azy's blob shifted closer. "Hey guys. You ever remember freakboy wearing glasses?"

Chad chuckled. "Huh, nope."

The other girl sputtered. "Well, uh—"

"See?" Azy waved a vaguely arm-shaped blur and slapped it on the table. "You're just making up crazy things, crazy boy. Did your glasses have x-ray vision and lazers?"

Dib tired to reach across the table and take the glasses off her face. Instead his hand connected hard with something, and Azy let out a shrill yelp.

"You psycho!" The Azy-blob reeled away. "You hit me! Mr. Flagg, Dib hit me! He went crazy and jumped across the table!"

Mr. Flagg's voice came from somewhere to Dib's right. "Mr. Membrane, you are no gentleman."

Dib turned and waved at a whitish blur with a big brown hair-blur on top. "I didn't mean to. I couldn't see her because she took my glasses."

"I dunno what he's talking about, Mr. Flagg." Her voice had a smarmy, mock-innocent tone that almost made Dib wish he'd hit her on purpose. "These are _my _glasses. He's making things up again. Remember all that stuff about undead moths last year?"

Mr. Flagg sniffed. "No one remembers better than I." He paused. "Well, perhaps the Hazmat team."

"If those are her glasses, then where are mine?"

"You know." Azy made a teeth-suckng noise. "I don't remember him wearing glasses."

"Of course I do!" Dib stopped himself from flinging his hands in the air – knowing his luck, he'd end up smacking the teacher. "I've always worn glasses! I was wearing them five minutes ago."

Azy's blob shifted and rose, either standing on her stool or sitting on the table. She yelled, "Anyone here remember that guy wearing glasses?"

Around them, students muttered. Someone called back, "I don't even know his name." More murmuring, then: "Is he even in this class?"

Dib's eye twitched. Some of these kids had been in classes with him since ninth grade, he knew it. Sure, he didn't know half of _their _names, but – he hated to admit it, but the only one who could have backed him up was Zim.

The class came to the conclusion that Dib had never worn glasses, and that he was a monster for hitting a sweet, bright-lipped girl like Azy.

"I will not stand for violence in this classroom," said Mr. Flagg. "Unless it be between volatile chemical compounds. Mr. Membrane, please remove yourself to the hall for the remainder of the class. You will also complete a make-up assignment. Topic: the workings of an eye with flawless 20/20 vision."

"This is insane!" said Dib. "I can't even find the hallway."

A flesh-toned blur flickered by Mr. Flagg's face. Dib assumed he was flapping his hand. "Very good, Mr. Membrane. Convincing hysterics." The arm-blur lengthened, probably pointing toward the door. "Out."

Dib eased off his stool and attempted to aim himself toward the door. He instantly ran into the corner of the lab bench. He stumbled down the aisle and stopped when his face met the corkboard on the back wall. Waves of snickering from the class followed each impact.

"See?" he said. "I can't find the door!"

Mr. Flagg cleared his throat. "Kindly stop fooling around, Mr. Membrane."

Dib gritted his teeth. He groped his way along the wall until he hit the doorframe, and eased out into the hall. Someone swung the door shut behind him, muffling the class's giggles. Dib edged along the wall, found a spot that didn't feel like a door or locker, and slid down to sit on the floor.

The hallway was a mess of beige and dark green blurs. The occasional student-blob passed by, sometimes larger blobs chattering to themselves. The end-of-class bell rang and a lumpy mass spilled out the Biology classroom door. Dib couldn't even pick Azy out to confront her. Mr. Flagg didn't come by with the make-up assignment; either he was saving it for next class, or he was waiting inside for Dib to come and retrieve it. Well, with any luck he would forget about it if Dib didn't show up. He didn't think he could navigate the classroom again. In fact, he had no idea how he was going to get home, or even off this floor. At the very least he was in for another afternoon of skipped class.

The Zim-tracker in his pocket beeped. He pulled it out and held it right up to his face. Zim was within twenty feet of him – either directly above or below him, or heading down the hall. A second later Zim's voice floated out of the hallway blurs. "Make way for Zim! Zim is making his normal way down this normal hall in search of the normal smelly Dib."

Dib squinted around the hall. A red blob with attached green blobs hovered toward him, and Zim's ranting amplified.

"Zim?" he said in the general direction of the red blob.

"Dib-beast! Cease your eye-squinty and come with Zim! I have things for you to be amazed at."

Dib shook his head. "I can't see anything, Zim. That girl in Biology class took my glasses and she won't give them back."

"Pft," Zim scoffed. "You need those goggles to see? Human eyes are pathetic."

"Yeah, yeah." Dib stood up. "Look, can you give me a hand? I need to get to the secretary's office and phone my dad. He can send someone to pick me up."

"Zim has hands!"

The alien grabbed Dib's hand and yanked him away from the wall. Dib stumbled after him. He could only tell the difference between floor and ceiling because the latter had light coming off it. He supposed he had to trust Zim not to throw him down the stairs or anything.

Dib took the stairs slowly at first; after three flights he had a handle on the step widths and distance to each landing. Zim kept his grip on Dib's hand. He didn't mind at first. It meant Zim wouldn't get distracted, run off and strand him. But by the fourth floor Dib was paying less attention to the steps, and more to the blobs passing by them. Every other one would choke and giggle. The multi-part blobs whispered.

Only after they reached the first floor did it occur to him that maybe the other kids couldn't tell he was practically blind, and maybe it looked like he was holding hands with Zim for no reason.

It was lunch hour, and the first floor hallway was crammed with student blobs, the cafeteria line spilling out into the hall. More snorts and snickers followed Dib and Zim. It re-ignited the nervous coil in his stomach, the one that had started last Tuesday after their lunch hour on the stage. People would figure out, now, what he'd been up to.

He pried his hand out of Zim's. "Are we almost there?"

Zim grabbed his hand back. "Yes."

"Okay." Dib yanked his hand away. "I can see you enough. I'll just follow your red shirt."

Zim's voice came from off to his right. "Did you know you're talking to a poster?" His hand slipped back around Dib's, and he dragged the boy off down the hall, giggles and murmurs in their wake.

Dib extracted his hand and shoved Zim. "I said, I'll just follow you."

Zim hissed. "Do you also need your goggle things to not-be-stupid? Or is there something _hideously _wrong with your hand?"

The hallway was too quiet. The blots of colour on all sides told Dib they were still surrounded by students, but now they weren't talking amongst themselves. They were watching the spectacle of Spooky versus Skin Condition, going down in the first floor hallway.

Dib clenched his fists. "What's wrong with my hand is you touching it. It's weird, Zim. Maybe you don't know that, because you're an alien."

"Very well," said Zim. "If you don't like Zim's ingenious plans, you can find your own way to the, eh, wherever we were going." The red blob of Zim's shirt melted into the rest of the crowd-blur.

"You didn't even know where we were going?"

Zim didn't respond. The red shirt didn't reappear.

"Zim?" Dib ran a hand through his hair. He held the other up in front of him. "Zim? Hey, did he leave?"

Someone snickered. "Uh, yeah. He went to the front foyer. Better go catch up with him."

"I can't _find _the front foyer! I can't see anything!"

"Weak, man," said the voice.

The murmur of conversation resumed around Dib, and blurred shapes flowed past like silty water. He held his hand up and made his way to the nearest wall. Eventually his hands met cold, ridged metal – a row of lockers. He crept along aimlessly, hoping Zim had at least brought him to a hallway _near _the office. After tripping over two girls eating lunch by their lockers, and knocking over a longboard propped against the wall, he found a set of double doors. He pushed the bar and stepped through, out into what smelled and felt like open air.

Dib cursed under his breath. Somewhere ahead of him, basketballs thumped on pavement and cracked against backboards. The basketball court was on the blacktop strip beside the school. He was on the complete opposite side of the building from the office.

He sat down on the steps. He could do this – just go back inside and hug the left wall until he reached the doors to the office hallway. No problem. Easy. He didn't need Zim to lead him. So what if not one other person had offered to help him? He didn't need their help.

Something, or from the sound of it a crowd of somethings, pattered up the blacktop toward Dib. A four-peaked mass of colour materialized out of the pavement-grey and stood in front of him.

A boyish, smoker-rough voice spoke: "What's your problem, Spooky boy?"

Dib rolled his eyes. "Not that you care, but this stupid girl in my Biology class stole my glasses, and now I can't even find my way to a phone."

"That's funny," said the voice. "My really hot and not-stupid girlfriend just showed me these glasses she nicked off some loser in her Biology class."

Dib dropped his head. Of course it was Azy's boyfriend. He conjured up a mental picture: a hem of piercing up the edges of both ears, with gauges on the lobes so big he could stick his middle fingers through; a jean jacket pocked with Anarchy pins and rivets he'd stolen from shop class and forced through the fabric. He played the euphonium in band class but no one made fun of him, lest they find themselves with a euphonium cleaning stick shoved in uncomfortable places. And Dib had just insulted his girlfriend.

Since there was no hope of getting out of this with his spine intact anyway, Dib looked up and said, "So, would you mind telling Azy to give my glasses back?"

Something fast and knuckled connected with Dib's temple. A similar object met his jaw. Hands grabbed his coat collar and hauled him forward into a mess of gut-punches and arm-pulls and shoving. No matter what direction, he met another set of hands, felt another burst of pain from his face and back and knees. It was like being in a blender, right down to the swirl of colours.

The hands pulled him across the blacktop and lifted him up off the ground, over some kind of wall, the top of which dug in between his shoulderblades. He landed on a pile of hard, round orange things. He held his face close and squinted – basketballs. He was in the big wooden ball bin at the end of the court.

The lid of the bin slammed shut, pinning him between the flat food and the pile of balls. A pair of balls at his back held him tight against the lid; he was immobilized. The only light came from an inch-wide slit on the front of the bin. Outside, the end-of-lunch bell rang, and the students' chatter and giggles and footsteps faded off toward the school.

Dib wasn't particularly claustrophobic. Elevators gave him no problem, nor did closets or the cramped cockpit of Tak's ship. Uncountable hours crammed in a dark ball bin, however, did make him somewhat nervous. By the last-period bell, he was kicking and slamming on the bin lid, as hard as he could with the balls restricting his movement. By the end-of-day bell he was shouting and pleading. Soon the crowd sounds petered out. Most nights the skool staff left the ball bin outside; the latch had a lock on it, and half-flat, skool-grade basketballs were hardly a hot item with thieves. So Dib was locked in for the night. Most likely until noon the next day. He couldn't even check his watch to see how many hours that was. He proceeded to hyperventilate.

The next few hours passed in a haze of skin-crawling, lung-shrinking panic. The light through the inch-wide slit turned grey and disappeared, leaving Dib in the cramped, airless dark. He pictured the skool staff finding his skeleton in here, the flesh and skin dissolved to dust after a million years in the bin, bones polished by the basketballs' nubbly rubber hides. He touched the tips of his fingers to the lid and tried punching his way through the wood. He saw it in a movie once. All it did was bruise his knuckles.

At some point in the night a red light glowed through the slit in the wall. Dib figured he'd now moved on to visual hallucinations. Something warbled, then exploded right outside the bin. The lid lifted, and at least six arms pulled him up and out. Could, rough metal curved under his neck – Zim's spider legs. And his spaceship, front floodlights glowing red. It must be. The bright red smudges of his eyes peered down at Dib.

"Stupid, smelly human," said Zim. "This is what happens when you reject Zim's brilliant plans."

Dib lifted his finger. "Look—"

"Stop moving!"

Something pricked the side of Dib's neck, and he lost consciousness.

--

Dib woke up on a flat, cold surface, with his eyes pried and held open, and red light flooding his vision. Either he really was dead and entombed, or Zim had been the one playing _him _all this time, and now he was strapped to an examination table, ready for torture and dissection.

The red light clicked off and Zim said, "Are you finally awake? That dose would only have kept an Irken down for an hour. You've been out for four. I even had time to fix your body-meats. And I made these!"

The hooks holding Dib's eyelids back released. Before he could reach up to rub his eyes, a maroon object lowered at him and attached to his face. The entire room came into focus: a high-ceilinged room full of glowing purple tubes. Some lower level of Zim's base. The last time Dib was in here, he was trapped inside one of the purple tubes, in an altered-time field. He blinked, and poked the object on his face. The outside was slick and solid, somewhere between metal and plastic.

"Goggles?" he said.

"Are they not amazing?" Zim moved into view and clenched his fists. "While you were unconscious I scanned your eyeballs. Your filthy species hasn't bred out basic genetic defects yet." He crossed his arms and stuck his non-existent nose in the air. "An Irken would never need external lenses to see."

"Do you ever get tired of telling me how much better your species is?"

Zim blinked. "No." He reached down and clicked the side of the goggles. The room went black, with green and red blobs where Zim and the glowing tubes had been. It clicked again, and suddenly a skeleton stood in front of him. "I also gave you infra-red and x-ray settings."

Dib played with the dial on the side, cycling through the settings. He switched back to the regular view. "Why?"

Zim shrugged. "Eh."

Dib swung his legs off the table. He expected his back or ribs to twinge. They had screamed with pain when Zim lifted him out of the ball bin. Instead he was just stiff. Even his face and head had stopped throbbing. "Hey, you really did patch me up. Do I even want to know?"

Zim twirled his hand. "Basic Irken technology."

Dib slid off the table. His legs buckled under him and he crumbled to the floor. His head swam.

"While I admit the floor of my base _is _impressive, shouldn't you be thanking me with _the lovins_?"

Dib didn't want to know where he'd picked up _that _phrase. "Something's wrong, Zim. I can't stand up."

"Hmm." Zim summoned a floating red orb. It orbited Dib and beeped. "My scans say your filthy human meats messed up the healing process. Your injuries are fixed, but the rest of your system is all, not-good."

"Great. Now what am I supposed to do?"

Zim held his hands behind his back. His spider legs extended out from his Pak and lifted Dib back onto the table. "Your meats will heal themselves in about eight hours."

"I could just go back to sleep then."

"Yes, yes, return to your unconscious, drooly state. But first, thank me!" He thrust his face right up to Dib's. "Thank me good."

Dib was in no position to refuse. Zim had him in his base, seeing with the aid of Irken technology, and physically defenceless. He sighed and gave Zim a quick peck on the lips.

Zim pulled back. "That will do for now. Now sleep!"

Dib looked down at the metal table. "Um. Don't you have anything – softer? Like a bed?"

"Zim has no need for human furnitures like _beds. _Irkens do not sleep."

Dib nearly pointed out that Zim _did _sleep, ever since the effects of his part-human genetic structure set in. He stopped himself – no need to let Zim know about the surveillance probe. Anyway, this explained why Zim always ended up sleeping in the chair in front of his computer console.

"Whatever," said Dib. He took his coat off, balled it up and tucked it under his head as a pillow. He rolled onto his side and, despite the hard table, fell into a fitful sleep.

--

Zm bent over the workbench where he'd pieced together Dib's replacement goggles. He poked through the clipped wires and lenses for pieces to save for future projects. Across the room, the Dib-human made small snorty noises and rolled around on the examination table.

Zim growled and marched to the table. He fisted his hands on his hips. "Stupid human!"

Dib rolled over and scratched his chest. He licked his lips and murmured.

"Cease your struggly-squirming. Your meats won't repair unless you lie still." He pressed a button on the side of the table. Restraint bands emerged from under the slab, but didn't close over Dib's limbs yet. "Don't make me use these."

Dib's eyes cleared some, and he held his arms in against his chest. "Hey!"

"Well then stop moving!"

"I—"

"_Stopmoving!_"

"Zim!" Dib propped himself up on his elbows. "This table is really uncomfortable. I can't sleep well on it." He pointed up. "Don't you have a couch on the ground floor? Why can't I sleep on that?"

Zim crossed his arms. It sounded like a good idea, but upon closer inspection it had a fatal flaw: Zim hadn't thought of it. He waved his hand. "Keep trying, Dib-worm. I will think of something. It will be ingenious."

Dib grumbled and rolled back onto his side.

"Gir!"

The ceiling rattled, and Gir tumbled out of a ventilation tube and landed at Zim's feet. The robot giggled and kicked his legs.

"Gir, retrieval mode!"

The robot pulled one of his cylindrical eyes out and threw it at Zim's head.

"No, Gir." Zim shook his head and threw the eye tube back. "I need you to find whatever squishy-softy things you can in the base. Retrieve things from our horrible neighbours if you have to."

"Okay!" Gir removed his right leg, attached his eye-cylinder in its place, and threw the leg at Zim. The robot shrieked and hobbled off on his now-uneven limbs.

Zim sighed. He eyed the workbench scattered with parts and wires. Beside him, Dib had stopped squirming for the moment, and his shoulders rose and fell in a regular rhythm. Zim still had the lingering urge to throw Dib in a suspension tube and run unnecessarily painful tests on him. The problem was that he was running out of tests. This new lippy-mouthy thing was kind of like a test: it completely disarmed the Dib-human, and it made him make pain-y noises – the quiet groans he kept uttering when they were on the soft blue cube. What's more, Dib kept coming back for it. What amazing new power he had over the human!

Besides, despite how disgusting the computer's clips of rollings-about had looked, Zim found the mouthy thing enjoyable. In fact, he found it more enjoyable every time they did it. It reminded him of the first time he launched a personal space cruiser and rocketed past the gravitational pull of the smeet nursery planet: the physical rush of the press-then-release on his skin, then the gut-thrill of weightlessness, and the view of endless open space.

However, no mouth-thing-ing would occur while the Dib's meat systems were too weak to hold themselves upright. Zim marched to the nearest transport tube. Since Gir had probably forgotten his mission already and replaced all his body parts with stale takeout food, it was up to him to find squishy surfaces for Dib's heal-faster nest.

--

Dib half-woke when Zim scooped him off the exam table and deposited him onto a surface with the consistency of a bag of marshmallows and a smell of dust burning on a radiator. His muscles happily creaked and loosened and he nuzzled his face into what he hoped was fabric. He might have even mumbled a "Thank you."

This time he conked out all the way. The next time he woke up, Gir was sitting on his hip, kicking his side with legs wrapped in tortilla shells, and something was tickling the underside of his jaw.

Dib licked his teeth and made a face. The nasty, fuzzy taste in his mouth told him he'd been out for at least a few more hours. All limbs and life support systems present and accounted for. That was good. What the heck was on his jaw?

He peered down. Zim lay next to him, curled up on his side. His antennae twitched slightly, brushing at Dib's jaw and throat. Other than that, he lay still and (uncharacteristically) quiet. He was actually asleep. He'd fallen asleep, right beside Dib.

"Boy are you stupid," Dib whispered. "I could kill you or capture you right now."

_Why would you say that out loud?_

Dib shrugged.

_He thinks we're allies. He's showing he trusts me. I think. I mean, we're in his base – he probably has security everywhere. Maybe he programmed his robot dog to eat my legs if I try anything._

Gir stirred. He slid off Dib's hip and onto Zim's thigh; his tortilla-wrapped legs made a squishing noise. Zim squirmed and batted him off. The robot squealed and crashed somewhere beyond the squishy beige _whatever _they were lying on.

Zim opened one eye. "Huh? Heh?"

Dib smirked. "I thought you said Irkens don't sleep."

Zim closed the one eye and opened the other. "Heh?!"

Dib shook his head. "Never mind." The antennae still tickled under his chin. He gently pushed them away, down toward Zim's head.

As his fingers brushed along the antennae, Zim's eyes closed and he made a murmury noise. Dib's eyebrows rose. He let one hand linger on an antenna, and rubbed his thumb where it bent near the end. Zim murmured again, and made his creaking noise. Dib grinned. Antennae – who knew? He wrapped his hand around the base of one antenna and slowly slid it along, to the bend and then the tip. The surface was like suede. Zim groaned and stretched his legs.

"Wow," said Dib. "I didn't know those did that."

Zim snapped out of his content wiggling and glared up at him. "Silence. Do not mock my sensory organs. Yours are, y—g—" He jabbed a finger in Dib's chest. "They're stupid!"

"At least mine don't make me go all woogly."

"Your legs are woogly!" Zim shoved Dib onto his back and crawled on top of him, straddling his stomach. "Let's see what your organs do." He reached for the side of Dib's head.

Dib squirmed and held Zim's arm away. "What are you doing?"

"Woogling your ear-organs."

"What's wrong with you?" Dib laughed in spite of himself. He struggled to keep Zim's hands away.

The alien tried pinning them above Dib's head, but found himself with no hands left to do – whatever he was attempting. Finally he succeeded in sticking his finger in Dib's ear.

"Nyeh! Ow!" Dib pulled his head away. "That hurt! Are you done?"

"Hm." Zim's jaw jutted. "Are you sure it doesn't make your sqeedly-spooch go all squiggly?"

Dib snorted. "I don't think I have one of those." He wiggled his shoulders against the bed. Or at least, he assumed it was a bed. He tried to look around, but Zim was still pinning him down. "What am I lying on?"

Zim sat back and put on his smug grin again. "I modified the Vortian liquid I used on my Santa suit. And the city-eating blob-creature. And the killer fishbowl." He made a _shoo-shoo _motion with his hand. "And all the other creations that I intended to fail horribly the way they did. I reprogrammed it to provide maximum comfort to whoever lies on it."

"Why does it smell like dust and radiator?"

Zim's eyes flattened. "Eh. Gir covered it in curtains he found… somewhere."

"Oh. Okay."

They paused. Dib took stock of their position: Zim straddled his hips, and his hands rested on his chest. He should be uncomfortable with something like this, but between the recent touchy, and years of brawling with the alien, he'd barely registered the contact. And maybe it was a side effect of the intuitively comfortable Vortian bed-thing, but right now it felt _comfortable. _Really comfortable. As in, he knew he'd have to leave eventually, but he hoped it would bed sometime around when the sun burned out and the universe collapsed on itself.

Zim bent down and kissed him, and that was comfortable too. Except after a second it was comfortable, _with _an added jitter in his chest, a wriggling somewhere between his ribs. Zim held his face and touched his ear again, but this time lightly, and maybe unintentionally, on the back of the shell. The chest jitter spread to a prickle down his stomach, a twinge in his hips so sudden it made them jump. If he had a squeedly-spooch, he was sure it'd be doing weird things.

Dib didn't understand. Zim shouldn't be pinning him down. He shouldn't be allowing it. This was not the point of the exercise. His legs bent involuntary; his heels dug into the curtain-as-bedsheet and dragged it up.

His hands pushed Zim's red shirt up and slipped under it, creeping up his back. Like Zim's face and lips, the skin was smoother than a human's, and just cold enough to be unnerving. Dib's hands passed the creaking, vibrating patch and stopped at the hard shell of the Pak. Everything reminded him that Zim wasn't human. That should stop him, right? It occurred to Dib that he didn't exactly have anything to compare it to. Paranormal investigation hadn't left him much time to woo girls (or boys, or whatever he would have done). As yesterday reminded him, it hadn't even left him time for friends. The only one he knew was Zim. So in hindsight, this was kind of inevitable.

He tried to say, "Pathetic," but with Zim's mouth over his, it came out as a groan.

Zim mumbled back, something incoherent and possibly not in English. He dragged his hands down Dib's chest to his belly and lifted the apathetic-face t-shirt. His movements were slow and tentative and mimicked Dib's – also, he hadn't bothered to take his gloves off. As usual, Zim had no idea what he was doing. Then again, neither did Dib.

--

They figured it out. Bits of it, at least. Not every bit, but enough to pass the morning. Mostly the bits with hands on hipbones, fingers trailing down – with foreheads to the belly, hands combing hair or antennae.

And after a critical, shuddering point, and a string of what Dib assumed were Irken curse words, Zim sat up with his antennae askew and his eyes wide with shock.

Dib was still breathing heavily. He tugged Zim's arm. "Zim. Hey, Zim? Spaceboy. Come back down."

Zim kept staring off over Dib's head. His eye twitched. "What… was that?"

Dib dropped his face into his hands. "That was – that was the whole point of us being, doing—" He gestured at the two of them, and the rumpled sheets.

Zim blinked at him.

Dib wracked his brain for a way to put it that Zim would understand. One that wouldn't cause Dib's face to melt off from embarrassment. "It's." He held his hands up and bobbled his head sarcastically. "'Victory for Zim'"

Zim clutched his hands. "Victoryyy?"

"Yeah. Sure. 'Victory.'"

The alien punched his fists in the air. "_VICTORY FOR ZIM!_'"

Dib shook his head. He reached behind him and pulled a corner of the curtain over his hips. When he looked back up, Zim was watching him with narrowed eyes.

"What?" said Dib.

The alien pounced on him. "Zim demands more victory!"

--

Still later, they lay on their backs in a T-shape, Zim's head resting on Dib's stomach. Dib suspected his entire body had been replaced with whatever pillowy, heavy substance the "bed" was made of. If he concentrated and summoned every ounce of his remaining energy, he could lift his arms. Maybe.

His brow furrowed. "Wait. Zim, how did you find me in the ball bin?"

Zim reached up and poked Dib in the cheek, then up the nose, then in the eye. "Heh? Where are your goggle-things?"

Dib flopped his hands on the bed. "I took them off! You said they were cold on your stomach."

"Lies!" shouted Zim. "Anyway, I used the Voot's x-ray scope. The same technology I put in your goggles."

"Yeah," said Dib, "but you were _looking _for me. Why didn't you just leave me in there?"

"Your _puny _human mind couldn't comprehend the answer to that question."

Dib quit playing with Zim's antennae and laced his hands over his chest. The ceiling loomed over them, the purple containment tubes stretching up like pillars. During Zim's louder moments, there had been an echo.

Dib said, "You don't know why you came looking, do you."

Zim kicked at the bed. "I know everything!"

"Sure." Dib let his hands drift back to Zim's head, and stroke along the antennae until Zim relaxed and creaked again. The fact remained: Zim saved his ass. He patched him up. He programmed him a freaking bed. All that might warrant a "Thank you."

_Thank you._

He found he couldn't say it out loud.


	7. Lessons in the Mesosphere

**NOTES: **I know I said I was aiming for Tuesdays, but I finished this early and am, in fact, horribly impatient. Also, the song is called "Another Sunday," so updating on a Sunday may look intentional. It's all deliberate. Really.

I'm really iffy about original characters in fanfiction – it's hard to pull off gracefully. Elite Soldier Drylow doesn't have a huge part, but I hope he's at least mildly entertaining. He is, essentially, a fanboy. A great big Tallest fanboy. Oh Drylow.

"Spuzzumland" is, in this universe, a country comprised of British Columbia, Alaska and most of the U.S. northwest. I know Jhonen was big on not referring to actual, our-universe places, so this is in keeping with that. There is an actual place in British Columbia called Spuzzum. It also happens to sound like a Zimverse-esque name, so in here it's the capital of its own coastal country. Hoorah for Spuzzum.

The final scene is in list form because because I have a weakness for messing with story structure, and in particular a weakness for lists. It's rare for me to make it through a story without including a list. I also spent most of the final scene laughing at how ridiculous it was, which makes me think I'm missing the point of writing romance.

Thankyou to everyone who commented, and special thanks to Desdemona Kakalose, who suggested that Gaz be the artist behind "Johnny's" paintings. The one thing I couldn't connect between Dib and Johnny was the art, but I _would _believe Gaz got into art in high school.

Notes too long. Time for story.

**WARNING: **Once again, references to sexual acts between two male-shaped characters. The references in this chapter are more overt, even crude, but there is still no play-by-play porn. Because I cannot, for the life of me, write it.

--

**Chapter Six: LESSONS IN THE MESOSPHERE**

_I'm out of my head  
That was what they said  
There was no way I would  
Ever trust again  
There's something that fills you up  
And it feels you up and then  
It takes control of your better sense_

_Take me to your world  
I want to know if I belong  
There instead of here…  
It is unordinary  
To want this affection  
But I don't have a real friend  
And I hate my whole family  
But from my bed, my window's  
Lit by red light  
I have seen before, while floating away._

I Mother Earth – Another Sunday

Elite Soldier Drylow ran his fingers over the cruiser control panel. He'd been traveling three months now, and the navigation systems told him he was barely halfway to planet Earth. Another Soldier might now grumble at being sent to a planet in such a remote corner of the universe. Another Soldier might now make hissy, snorty noises at his leaders behind their backs.

But not Elite Soldier Drylow! No, even now he thanked his Tallest: strong-willed, ruthless Red, and the ever bright and charismatic Purple. He thanked them for their foresight in sending him on such a long journey before his mission. The months alone in his cruiser allowed him time to prepare, to review every detail and contingency plan of the mission ahead, to run endless diagnostics on his equipment, and to arrange and rearrange his collection of Tallest pictures, hologrammatic collectable figures, and dangly ceiling monitor decorations.

He twisted around in his seat and considered the left side-panel of the cruiser. Last week he had taken down the exclusively Tallest Red collage and arranged assorted Red-and-Purple pictures in a kind of supernova explosion shape. Now he wasn't so sure about it. It meant that some of the images on the bottom were upside-down – wasn't that a tad irreverent? He began peeling the self-adhering posters off the wall.

As they uncovered the panel's shiny surface, Drylow's own reflection replaced the faces of his beloved leaders. The Soldier gave himself a "lookin'-good!" thumbs-up. He inspected his contact lenses to make sure they were centred right. The lenses were his prized accessories: one red eye, and one purple.

Drylow was bred with green eyes. It used to bother him: he was nothing like _either _of his idols. For awhile he embraced the green, reasoning that there was roomfor a Tallest Green alongside the great Red and Purple. Then he realized his own arrogance, and abandoned the idea. He was in no way equal to the almighty Tallest; he was fit only to serve them. But to show his devotion, he acquired the red and purple lenses – one of each colour, to show he held them both on the same, vastly superior level.

He squeezed behind the pilot's seat and began peeling the posters off the opposite panel. He would re-do the entire shrine. Thank the Tallest for sending him on such an important mission! He would not disappoint them.

--

Sunday afternoon: Dib and Zim perched on the couch in the Membrane household living room, playing Microbe Fighter X9. It had been four months since the incident with the ball bin and the Vortian Smart Bed, and boy and alien had since eased into a terrifying new phase of interaction: actually hanging out together.

It wasn't easy. They tried that old standby, the dinner and a movie. Dib had to drag Zim out of the movie halfway through because he wouldn't stop laughing maniacally when human characters died. Dinner was more successful: they split a Fun Dip up on their cliff ledge, and shared a few sugar-gritty kisses.

There was always something awkward and unfitting about these "dates," though. They found the solution, one bored evening at Dib's house: video games. Especially race or fight games. It let them rage and scream death threats at each other like they were used to, but it all channelled through the onscreen characters.

"Rrgh! Rr!" Zim flailed wildly on his end of the couch, button mashing for his life. Onscreen, his armored parasite cowered and flattened to the floor as Dib's amoeba bounced on it.

"Face it, Zim!" Dib entered the attack combos he'd picked up playing against Gaz. "I beat you the last three rounds, and I'll do it this time too!"

"No!" Zim's thumbs hammered on the buttons. "Never! Zim will defeat you, wobbly fibrey blob-thing!"

Dib's amoeba powered up, absorbed Zim's parasite and spat it out, now at critically low health. Zim screamed. His mechanical legs whirred out of the Pak, arched over his head and tapped the controller buttons. He now had two extra "thumbs" to button mash with.

"Hey!" said Dib. "Stop cheating! You said you wouldn't do that any more."

"I lied!"

Dib botched two combos in a row, and his amoeba lost the upper hand. "C'mon! Hey! Nyeh! No fair!"

Zim cackled. "Filthy human! Your inferior limb count will be your downfall."

"Oh yeah?" Dib switched to button mashing with one hand and shuffled sideways on the couch until he sat right next to Zim. With his free hand he pulled the alien's wig off and threw it over the back of the couch.

Zim gasped. "What are you doing? Do not remove my disguise." He shied away from Dib. "My brilliant disguise!"

Dib slipped his arm around Zim's shoulders and pressed his palm to the side of his face, to keep the alien's head still. He craned his head up and pinched the stalk of one of Zim's antennae between his lips. He added a gentle nip, and a quick tongue-swipe. Zim made a gurgling noise and tilted his head back. Onscreen his parasite stopped wailing on Dib's amoeba. Dib continued to nibble the antennae. He braced his controller against his leg and punched in the button combo for the Quad Fission Crush. His amoeba split into four and slammed into the parasite from all sides.

He released Zim's antennae and lay back on the couch. Onscreen, the parasite exploded and text flashed: _Amiiba is Win! _Dib laced his fingers behind his head. "See Zim? If you're going to cheat, I'll just cheat better."

Zim chucked the controller over his shoulder and pointed at Dib. "Ugly Dib-worm! You cheated, with your bitey cheating mouth."

"I just _said _I cheated." Dib huffed. "Jeez, Zim."

Zim climbed on top of him and clutched his shirt collar. "Admit to your bitey cheating mouth!"

"I just di—"

Dib didn't even expect to finish sentences like that any more. Zim's mouth was on his, and in seconds his fingers were in Dib's hair, his tongue on his teeth, their hips pressed and restless, feet hooked behind calves.

Dib's moments of disgust had long passed – at least, the disgust he'd had _during _their activities. The truth was that now it felt good. It felt good from the first touch of Zim's lips, right through to the bit with hips squirming, legs cycling, body thanking every ridge on Zim's weird tongue. Nothing else in his life felt quite so good. And it still did its job: it kept the enemy distracted.

Zim let Dib push him back and down on the other end of the couch. Naturally they both tried for the upper hand, but Dib was the one who actively got off on it. It felt that much better to have Zim pinned and wriggling and asking for things and tipping his head back with eyes closed. Dib stroked both antennae and dove in for a kiss. He trailed his hands down Zim's chest to his sides, around to his lower back and his butt. Zim's arched and the room lit up with a flash and _snap-whir _sound.

Wait. Even Zim didn't make _snap-whir _sounds. Dib cut the kiss short and swung his head around. In the doorway to the front foyer stood Gaz, with one of her huge professional-grade cameras up to her eye. The camera flashed again. Dib's hand still rested on Zim's backside. Their hips were still pressed together. And thanks to Dib's game-winning tactics, Zim's wig was off, his weird angular head and antennae exposed.

Dib scrambled off Zim and backed to the opposite end of the couch. Zim shrieked and pointed at Gaz's camera. "Human image capture device!" He patted the top of his head and yanked on his antennae. "Oh no. Oh no! My brilliant disguise! I've been image captured without my disguise." He screamed, leapt off the couch, bolted across the room and dove out the window. His footsteps pattered off into the evening.

Dib peered over the back of the couch – Zim had left his wig behind. He turned back to Gaz. "I know what it looks like."

Gaz fiddled with the menus on her camera. She turned it around to show the first picture she'd taken. On the screen, Zim and Dib lay on the couch with their legs tangled and their mouths mashed together. Zim's fingers were clearly heading down the back of Dib's pants.

Dib swallowed. "Yeah. It looks like that."

Gaz shrugged. "Eh." She looped her camera's shoulder strap around her neck and hung the camera at her hip.

"Gaz, you gotta delete those pictures."

"Why? Aren't they proof that—" She put on her low _I'm-a-doofus _voice. "—Zim's an aaalien?"

Dib reached for the camera. His sister twisted so it was out of his reach. "But it's also got me! Doing—!" Dib waved his arms. "The Swollen Eyeballs can't see that. No one can. They'll think I'm on Zim's side."

Gaz snorted. "Actually, you were on his front." She slouched off down the hallway, toward her room.

"Gaz. Hey!" Dib stumbled after her. He tripped on the hallway rug and scrambled at her door. His hand slammed on the wood just as it clicked closed. "Gaz, this is serious! You have to delete them."

A series of clicks and thunks sounded from the other side of the door. Gaz had gotten fed up with her lack of privacy in the house and had enough locks installed to keep out a cyborg army. Dib pounded on the door. "Come on! Gaz!" Silence from inside the room. He pounded until the sides of his hands stung.

He paused and rested his forehead on the _Beware Vampire Piggies_ signed plastered to the door. His mind raced and gibbered, picturing what would come next: Gaz uploads the pictures to the internet; the pictures get pasted all over the school; kids point and jeer; the Eyeballs eject him. He would never work in paranormal investigation again. His dad – well, actually his dad probably wouldn't notice. But still! He was ruined.

"Big fucking surprise." His brain was still muddled, but his voice was calm. It had that scratchy, nasal quality it had picked up lately, but only sometimes. Mostly when he talked to himself. "You got yourself caught. Didn't I tell you you were going too far? You deviant piece of shit."

_That's really not helping._

"You know what would help? If you didn't spend all your time getting off with E.T."

_It was the plan!_

"The plan. For science. For Earth. Sure. I give up on you. You don't care about the plan. You don't' care about Earth. _You _have become a hedonist. All you do any more is seek your own twisted pleasure."

Dib winced. He shut his eyes. _I got caught up. What's wrong with enjoying it if I have to do it anyway?_

He scoffed. "I can't help but feel you're missing the point."

Gaz's door opened and he fell into her room. He landed on something that clattered and crumbled. Whatever it was, he would probably have to get her a new one – even though that was technically her fault. She loomed over him, eyes narrowed, hair throwing shadows on her cheeks. "If you have to talk to yourself, can't you do it _away _from my room?"

Dib picked himself up. "Gaz, I promise I'll go away. Just please get rid of those pictures."

Gaz grumbled and paced to her easel and stool. On the easel sat her latest painting, half-finished: so far it looked like two eye sockets sprouting spiraling webbed veins. Her other paintings hung on the walls or sat propped up on the desk. The earliest ones were all of vampire pigs and video game environments, but lately her pieces had grown more surreal: stretched skulls and giant bloodshot eyeballs and filth-ooze backgrounds.

The worst were her mixed media projects. She'd stolen a pair of Styrofoam Dough Boy characters from a display in the grocery store, brought them home and painted them up with stripes and spirals and jagged rings around their eyes. One had the word "fuck" written on its chest; the other had a Z and a question mark. Gaz had made paintings and t-shirts with that Z? symbol, and she'd written it on the toes of her shoes. She said it meant "Question Sleep."

She picked up her palette and squeezed a blob of red paint into it. "I already got rid of the pictures, okay?"

"You did?"

She swirled a brush in the paint. "Pff, yeah. I'm not wasting memory card space on you and stupid Zim."

The camera sat on the Gaz's desk, beside her computer. Dib picked it up and scrolled through the saved pictures – mostly weird-angle shots of roadkill and underpasses, and buildings with spooky architecture. The pictures of him and Zim were gone. Dib let out a breath and put the camera down. "Thanks, Gaz."

She grunted, and laid a stroke of red paint along the edge of her canvas.

The defaced Styrofoam Doughboys stood under the window, propped up against the wall. They seemed to stare at Dib. The more he stared back, the more they creeped him out. Why did his sister have to make things like that? And they called _him _the freaky one.

Suddenly he realized he was speaking. "—back me up on something, Gaz."

"Hn."

"I need dad to fund an expedition but he said research grants are off-limits until my grades improve." An expedition? Dib didn't even know what he was talking about." If you vouch for me, he will realize how serious this is."

Gaz's brush paused. She set down on the palette and twisted to face Dib. She said, "Which one am I talking to?"

Dib blinked and tilted his head. "What?"

She glared at him for a long moment, then shook her head. "Never mind." She turned back to her canvas and resumed painting.

"So will you back me up on this?"

Gaz tucked the paintbrush between her middle and ring fingers and picked up a smaller brush. "No."

"That's uncharitable of you." Dib wasn't even paying attention to the words coming out of his mouth. He was eyeing the Doughboys again. The grins looked wider than before.

Gaz growled. "Dib, get out of my room before I poke these brushes through your eyes to your _brain._"

He was glad to, if only to get away from the Styrofoam monsters. He slipped out into the hallway and pulled the door shut behind him. Well, he'd accomplished what he went in there to do – make her delete the pictures. Why worry about some research grant request he didn't even remember making?

Dib returned to his room and settled into his desk chair. He mussed his hair into the Johnny C. prongs and contacted the Swollen Eyeballs. Agent Disembodied Head appeared onscreen; the bird on his shoulder fluttered its wings. Dib sat back in his chair and tented his fingers. "Agent Johnny C. here, with some information, and a request."

"I see." Agent Disembodied Head loomed in close to the camera. "Start with the information."

"Agent Johnny C." reached into the top left drawer of Dib's desk and pulled out a quarter-sized sample dish. He fed it into the dome-shaped biomatter analyzer beside the keyboard. The device inspected the contents of the disk, summarized its biological makeup and recorded the results. Johnny C. set it to transmit the results to Agent Disembodied Head.

_What's in there?_

"This," said Agent Johnny C., "is a sample of alien DNA. The species calls itself Irken. I have not determined their home planet. I realized you will be skeptical, but I think you'll find the sample contents are unique. The cellular structure does not match any species on Earth."

_Hey. Where did you get that?_

Johnny C. continued: "Irken anatomy features a pair of insect-like antennae on the top of the head. The antennae are covered in microscopic fibers. The sample contains a number of these fibers."

Disembodied Head looked to the left of his camera. "Hm," he said. "These readings _are _strange. This is the only proof you have?"

"It's not much, I know. I would have a body, but the creature is elusive. The species is relatively intelligent." His eyes flattened. "Some, more than others."

Disembodied Head nodded. His bird nodded too. "I'll keep this for further study. What's your request?"

Johnny C. folded his arms on the desk. "Recently I asked Agent Darkbooty for information on edible ore. I believe these Irkens have an interest in it. I wish to study it further." He pulled up a world map with all the Choconium deposits highlighted, and transferred it to Disembodied Head. "The nearest find is in the Pacific Northwest, in central Spuzzumland. I need to get there and collect evidence, but my resources are – limited, at the moment."

The Agent and his bird shook their heads. "The Swollen Eyeballs are a network, not a coherent organization. We don't have the resources to fund you."

"I realize that," said Johnny C. "I wondered, though, if an individual member would be willing to fund, or at least loan to me."

"I see. Have you talked to Agent Darkbooty about this?"

He pictured the old janitor he'd met at NASA Place – the familiar profile, the knowing look he gave Dib before firing him into space. The stitches and patches on his uniform. "I have reason to believe Agent Darkbooty lacks the personal resources to help me."

"That's my point," said Disembodied Head. "No doubt you'll come to realize, Agent Johnny C.: paranormal investigation is a calling. It doesn't leave much time to get rich. Most of us are in the same boat as Agent Darkbooty."

Johnny C. sighed. "I understand. I'll contact you when I have more information."

Disembodied Head nodded, and ended the call.

Dib put his computer into sleep mode. He scratched his head. _What am I talking about? Since when do I want to go to Spuzzumland?_

"You didn't think distracting Zim was going to work forever, did you?" He stood up, stretched and headed for the bed. "Zim will come to what miniscule sense he has, or his leaders will catch on and come themselves. I, for one, want to get to the Choconium before they do." He climbed onto the bed.

_You know, you're right. Man, sometimes even I forget how smart I am._

He snorted. "Right." He rolled over and set his alarm for school. At least the pictures were gone – he would have good news for Zim tomorrow. That is, if Zim managed to stop panicking in his base and actually show up at school.

--

Zim didn't show up at school until Wednesday. Dib passed on the news about the pictures and explained that he would have come to Zim's house and reported in person, but the gnome defenses were still set to keep Dib out. Zim shrugged at this. Dib suggested they be more cautious in their future _activities, _and the alien agreed. For the rest of the week they were too spooked to sneak off together at all.

Saturday night, Dib woke just after midnight to an oscillating hum outside and a red light shining through his window. The light glowed through the horizontal blinds and lit the entire room red. Dib recognized the light and hum from the night Zim pulled him from the ball bin.

A moment later, Zim forced the window open and struggled through. He flailed and fought with the blinds, clattering loud enough to wake the entire block, and finally tumbled onto Dib's bed.

"The Dib!" said Zim. "Curse your defensive window coverings!"

Dib crawled to him and held his hand over Zim's mouth. "Shh! You want us to get caught again?"

Zim pried his hand off and glared. "That's why I'm _here, _stupid human." He pointed out the window, past the now-ruined blinds. "If we go away in the Voot cruiser, Zim can have _victory _away from your horrible sister and her image-capturey device."

Dib gaped at him. "You're making a _booty call_?!"

"Cease your talk of boots!" Zim looped his arms around Dib's neck. "Give me victoryyy."

Dib rolled his eyes. His mouth quirked into a half-smile. "Yeah, okay."

Zim dragged him to the window and out into the yard. Dib found himself on the lawn beside his house, bare feet chilled from the wet grass, wearing only boxers and a thin t-shirt. He sprinted to the Voot cruiser. Zim opened the cockpit bubble and they climbed inside. Only once he was sitting in the pilot's seat did Dib remember how cramped Tak's ship had been – and back then he was half his current height. He scooted back on the seat to make room for Zim, who settled in between Dib's legs, and used his chest as a backrest.

The bubble closed, and the screens on the control panel flashed purple.

"Hm?" Zim gripped the edge of the console and leaned in toward the screens.

"Intruder alert!" said the ship. "Unauthorized bio-signature in the cockpit."

A dozen guns and tazers on mechanical arms emerged from the walls and pointed at Dib's head. He swallowed. "Um."

Zim chuckled. "Oh yeah. The defense systems." He turned and pulled a hair off Dib's head. Dib was too paralyzed to even whine. Zim fed the hair into a slot on the console and tapped some keys. "Computer. Allow subject 'The Dib' access to the Voot cruiser."

The computer made an unhappy _blat. _"Subject is not Irken."

"He is a slave to the Empire," said Zim.

Dib could swear the computer took on a sullen tone. "Processing." After a minute the purple screens eased back to green. "Defense parameters updated."

"Good." Zim's hands flew across the console, pushing buttons, twisting knobs and nudging sliders on the touchscreen. The Voot cruiser's resting hum keyed up and melted into the roar of the jets; the ship lifted off the ground, wobbled for a second, and blasted off.

They accelerated over the neighbourhood and up over the city, past the cliff lip and into the stratosphere. Inertia pressed Zim into Dib and Dib into the seat. Dib peered over Zim's shoulder; the ground and city lights fell away below them. Before the horrible incident at the pasta factory, Dib had tried piloting Tak's ship, but he never got it this far off the ground. Gaz had, when she rescued him from the ice flow, but all he remembered from that day was her boot crushing his head against the floor.

Ahead of them floated a front of clouds, piled high and peaked like mountains. They flew in, and the view outside the Voot turned to mottled, shifting grey. Dib pressed his hand to the glass and peered through, waiting for the clouds to give way to open, starry black. He'd done this once before, sort of: in Zim's horrible simulation of his future, where he had superhuman powers and led the Earth to victory. Once he was out of the simulation its sensations were like a dream: approximations of the real thing. Dib didn't realize how thin it was until now, until the Voot burst out from the cloud cover and into the light-splattered vastness of space.

The ship slowed and the pressure of acceleration faded. Soon the push of gravity faded too; Dib's stomach seemed to unhinge from his insides and his limbs took on a persisting rollercoaster-drop feeling. It was like constantly falling. He squeezed the saddle-seat between his legs to steady himself. Zim seemed to have a handle on zero-gravity. He leaned back and kept Dib stable against the seat.

The ship leveled off and settled into orbit. Below them, islands of cloud crawled past. Between the grey blobs the drop to Earth was black, with the occasional wink of city light. Dib rested his chin on Zim's shoulder. "Oh _man._"

Zim puffed out he chest. "Yes. _Marvel _at my piloting skills."

Dib reached around him and pawed at the console. "Let me try flying it."

"Fool! You think your pathetic brain can handle Irken technology?" Zim pulled Dib's hands back. "Stop touching things. You'll get them all Earth-smelly."

Dib moved his hands to Zim's legs, and ran them up his thighs to his hips. "_You _don't seem to mind."

Zim growled, but his hips squirmed, pressing into Dib's palms. Dib kissed his way up Zim' neck. The alien made a pleased noise and tilted his head.

Dib nuzzled his jaw. "C'mon."

"I don't think so." Zim's voice was fainter.

"C'mon."

"No."

Dib removed his hands from Zim's hips and laid them limply on the seat. "I guess I don't feel like _victory _then."

Zim's eyes snapped open and he sat up. "Agh! You and your rg—gh—_rules._"

He walked Dib through the console layout and navigation systems. Most of the knob-twisting and button pressing at takeoff was, it turned out, flash and unnecessary: Zim had been flying the Voot for so long that he liked to override the auto-systems and manually control the ship's balance, engine levels, internal environment, and so on. A less experienced pilot could fly the ship, leaving most of the work to the computer. Zim showed him the levers controlling the roll, pitch and yaw, and the keypad sequence to fire the jets. The ship bucked and rocketed off across the outer atmosphere, like a stone skipping on water.

Zim dragged his fingers across the console's main screen. Menus flipped past. He paused at one: Irken writing scrolled up the left side of the screen, and a wire model of the Voot cruiser spun on the right. Zim pointed. "That's the main screen. It leads to weapons, shields, engine… things."

"I can't read the writing."

"Of course not!" shouted Zim. "It is Irken, and far beyond—"

"—my ability to comprehend, yeah." Dib grabbed the two main control levers and pushed them forward like Zim had shown him. "I gotta try this."

The ship tipped forward and instantly went into a nosedive. Zim screamed. Dib yanked back on the levers; the ship somersaulted, spiraled and kept falling. He tried moving them separately, and the cruiser rolled, flew sideways for awhile, and finally climbed back to its original altitude – upside-down.

Dib righted the ship. Zim twitched and pried Dib's hands off the levers.

He laughed. "That was great!"

Zim turned and glared at him. "Don't touch my ship again."

Dib ignored him and reached for the controls. Flying the Voot was even better than riding it out of the atmosphere. It was better than catching a picture of a vampire mid-bite. Heck, it was even better than messing around with Zim.

Zim wrestled his hands away from the levers. He wriggled around and straddled Dib's lap. "No more flying! Victory now!"

"Come on. Just one more try."

The alien raised an eyebrow. He shifted forward so his hips ground against Dib's. All thoughts of piloting suddenly abandoned his head. He arched into Zim and groaned.

Zim hovered his lips over Dib's. "_What _did you want to try, again?"

"Bguh," said Dib.

--

To be fair, they did try something new. Something they hadn't quite made it to, in their four months of tentative experimentation. Something that, once again, Dib suspected he shouldn't have enjoyed quite so much.

--

Things Dib Learned at 285,000 Feet (A Comprehensive List):

**1.** The wrist-thin waistline Dib had noticed on Zim's leaders was not a natural feature of the species. It was more like foot-binding or the Kayan tradition of lengthening women's necks by wrapping them with brass coils. Once an Irken reached a certain height, he began wearing metal bands around his lower torso. Gradually he decreased the width of the ring and stacked more on top of it. The process narrowed the waist and elongated the body, making him even taller.

The pinched waist was an Irken beauty ideal. They could live with it because all life systems were sustained by the Pak, and the all-purpose internal organ Zim called a "squeedly-spooch." The rings squeezed the squeedly-spooch up into the chest cavity, giving the Tallest their wide-chested look.

The rings were worn tight, in order to force the body into its new shape, but there was still a risk of chafing. The inside of the band was usually coated with a soothing, lotion-like liquid to minimize skin damage. In hopes that Elite Soldiers and Invaders would grow to a height befitting their post, all ships were equipped with a set of rings, and a tube of the lotion-like goo.

It also worked well as lubricant.

**2.** Calling out "My Tallest" was Zim's equivalent of "oh my God," and not any indication that Zim had, in the heat of the moment, forgotten whom he was with.

**3.** It was not impossible to pilot a Voot cruiser mid-coitus – if by "pilot" one meant "bumped the control levers with his knees while hoisting Zim onto the console and accidentally pushed some buttons via Zim's back pressed to the control panel." It did, however, tend to send said cruiser into a spiraling nosedive.

**4.** Dating an extraterrestrial leads one to develop strange and difficult-to-fulfill kinks. There was nothing quite like hitting that clutching, screaming peak while Zim dug his claws into his shoulders – except maybe doing it while re-entering Earth's atmosphere. The return of gravity pulled his insides one way while the velocity pulled them another, and every tug just drew the pleasure out longer. And outside, the air around the ship burned up with him.

**5.** The Voot cruiser was designed (or perhaps modified, considering Zim's flying track record) to minimize pilot discomfort during a crash landing. So it was that Zim and Dib not only survived the ship slamming into the ground, rolling half a dozen times and skidding to a stop in Zim's front yard – they were comfortable enough to cuddle out the afterglow for the following hour, and call each other names that might have been scathing, if they weren't tangled together and petting each other's backs.


	8. Elite Soldier Drylow

**NOTES: **I'm going to warn you right now: the first scene of this chapter is the last of the happy-fluffy-slashtastical you'll see for awhile. Everything kind of goes to hell in this chapter. I'll also warn you that the next chapter will be an interlude between parts. I'm dividing the story into two parts, and this one marks the end of the first.

More alterna-geography: the Slapfish River is the Frasier; Otterburg is Vancouver; the town of Prize is fictional in any 'verse, but it lies just North of a little nowhere-town called Hope B.C. All the spelunking and flying-about action occurs in and over the Coastal Mountains.

Thankyou to everyone who commented, and sorry about the wait. It might be awhile until the next couple chapters come out, because I need to get a handle on some structure stuff for the interlude, and I need to sort out the story arc for Part II.

**WARNINGS: **Cartoonish but deadly weaponry; amateur spelunking (and no, that's not a euphemism); gratuitous terrain description; rebirth imagery like anvils; character death.

--

**Chapter Seven: ELITE SOLDIER DRYLOW**

_Shoot me with your raygun  
Full of holes so the daylight  
Can get to what's dark  
I remain trapped inside your body  
The vice above your head  
The hole inside your heart_

_Armour me with futile aspirations  
The knives of many nations  
A shovel and some dirt._

Matthew Good Band - Raygun

One morning, almost two months after their night in the Voot cruiser, Dib woke up on the Vortian Smart Bed with a sudden irresistible need to fly the ship again. He crawled out of bed, pulled his pants and shirt on, and nearly made it out of the room before Zim made a sleep-muttery noise behind him, and he turned to watch the Irken roll over and nuzzle the warm spot where Dib had slept. Dib smirked and shook his head. Perhaps as a symptom of half his body rebelling against the act, Zim slept restlessly. He _kicked. _

Dib walked back to the bed, leaned over Zim and gave the alien a quick kiss. Before he could pull back, Zim hooked his hand behind Dib's neck. Dib relented and gave another, longer kiss. And, just for the hell of it, a third. At that point Zim's hands pulled the back of his shirt up. Dib gave up and sunk down to lie on top of him.

--

An hour later, Dib crawled out of bed, pulled his pants and shirt on, and this time made it all the way out of the room. He told Zim he was going home to change. Instead he slipped into the Spare Stuff room at the other end of the level. Zim had let him build a raygun out of leftover parts and pieces, under the condition that he program it not to fire at Zim's bio-signature. Thanks to the general Irken design aesthetic – everything bright purple and bubbly – the results looked more like a super-soaker than an actual weapon. That suited Dib fine. It meant he could carry it around in public without getting arrested.

He picked up the gun and poked at the largest bubble-part – some kind of miniature energy storage cell, like cold fusion in battery form. Since the whole thing was made of spare parts, he'd found the cell didn't sit snugly in its cradle, so he'd braced it in with some Irken equivalent of caulking – which was, of course, bright green. He ran his finger along the seal and it came away dry. He turned the gun over in his hands: it looked like a toy, but its weight was substantial.

He aimed it at the far wall and pretended to fire. "Pyew! Pyew!"

He wasn't sure where he intended to fly the Voot cruiser, but a raygun would always come in handy. Dib tried shoving it in his hip pocket, then down the back of his pants. The gun, however, was the size of a small cat, and although Dib was thin, his waistband wasn't _that _loose. Finally he loosened his belt and tucked the gun between the strap and his hip. It stayed well enough. He shrugged and headed upstairs to the Voot cruiser bay.

He'd piloted the cruiser half a dozen times now, the last two with minimal help from Zim. Naturally Zim didn't let him take it out on his own, but it'd be fun to do it at least once without the alien backseat driving the whole time. He poked his head in the bay and scanned it for signs of Gir. Even if the robot was too brainless to alert Zim to Dib's Voot-borrowing, he would probably start screaming about squirrels or tube socks loud enough to wake the alien. That, or he'd demand to come along. Dib snuck across the bay, released the Voot cruiser's cockpit bubble and leapt inside.

Once he was in the pilot's seat he pulled a scrap of paper out of his back pocket. On it, in his writing, was a list of three names, followed by coordinates. He recognized the names from the Swollen Eyeballs' reports on Choconium, but didn't remember writing the note. He did know what to do with them: he tapped the touchscreen, navigated through the menus to the ship's Earth map, and input the three sets of coordinates. All the locations were in a valley in Central Spuzzumland, along the Slapfish River. They were within ten miles of each other.

"One of those," he said aloud, "is our motherload."

Dib started the ship and flew out of the bay.

--

Dib reached the Spuzzumland/Kanadia border in just over an hour. As soon as he crossed the border, thick grey overcast enveloped the ship. His research _had _told him to expect rain in Spuzzumland, even in the middle of July. He stayed in the clouds until the navigation system said he was over the Upper Slapfish. He brought the ship down.

Rain splattered on the cockpit bubble, but in a slow drizzle, not torrents – which was fortunate, since Dib couldn't find the windshield wipers on the Voot. Below, jagged green mountains lumped and peaked in every direction like mossy, half-crumbled pyramids. Valleys etched between the mountains, rivers like veins running and branching along their centers.

Directly beneath him ran the wide, grey-brow Fishslap. Ahead it narrowed, climbed into the Northern mountains and disappeared around a bend. According to the navigation screen, the three deposit locations fell just South of the bend, between two of the tiny nowhere-towns along the river.

Dib headed for the first location. As he approached he realized it was actually at the edge of one of the nowhere-towns, in a populated (well – in a broad sense of the word) area. He parked the ship in the forest, a ways up the mountain, and walked in to the town, Prize.

At the exact coordinates he did indeed find chocolate. He stood on a gravel road in front of a run-down, old-west-style wooden building, complete with porch, raised sidewalk and heavily seriffed font on the sign: Prize Towne Amazinge Naturale Chocolatese. Inside, a man composed entirely of beard and flannel told Dib about the Olde Rowland Family "Homegrown" Chocolates. "As Old as the Hills and Practically Part of Them." "Practically" being the operative word. The actual chocolates were made in a kitchen behind the store – or used to be, before Prize Towne became a franchise and moved its head office and production plant to Otterburg on the coast.

Dib trudged back to the ship, crossed the first location off the list and headed North to the second.

By the time he reached the coordinates, the rain had petered out and the cloud cover thinned. Sunlight knifed through, farther up the river. The second location was farther up from the valley floor. The report, he recalled, had mentioned a short crevasse leading down to a maze of caves. He circled until he spotted something promising: a clearing in the trees, like a long, scabbed gash in the mountainside. The lower half of the clearing was loose gravel; the upper was a face of rock, split down the middle by a thin crack.

Dib landed the ship on the gravel patch, at the edge of the trees. The rain must not have crossed this far North; as the Voot settled down it kicked up a plume of dust. Dib waited for it to clear. He rummaged around the clutter on the floor of the ship and found the goggles Zim had made him. As soon as he'd gotten to his spare pair of glasses, Dib brought the goggles back to Zim's base. They were more effective than regular glasses, and the extra settings were neat, but he couldn't exactly walk around in public wearing Irken technology.

He'd also asked Zim to add night-vision and high-powered zoom settings, and a setting that detected ectoplasm. He took off his glasses and replaced them with the goggles. He climbed out of the cruiser and crunched up the gravel slope. The rocks were loosely packed and he slid back a half-step for every stride he took. Overhead the overcast had given way to beating afternoon sun, and the dry air around him instantly began to warm. Back in the trees, insects buzzed like radio static.

The crack in the rock was longer than it looked from the air – about the lengths of a city block – but most of it was shallow, only a couple feet down. Near the top it deepened, downward and slightly to the left, and Dib found an opening that his goggles' x-ray setting told him led to a larger underground pocket. He squeezed into the hold feet-first and made it in up to his hips before he realized just how small the hole was. Dib was embarrassingly thin, and he was barely going to fit.

After a good half hour of contorting and inching downward (and nearly suffering flashbacks to his cramped evening in the ball bin), Dib felt the passage widen. He kept wriggling until he had enough room to move his arms, and reached up to set his goggles to night vision. He looked down. The tube of rock he was in continued down maybe ten more feet, then either stopped or levelled out.

It turned out to be the latter. Dib reached the bottom of the tube and backed through the short horizontal passage it led into. He ended up in a high, narrow, but thankfully much less cramped chamber. The walls on either side bulged in places, like pregnant bellies, sometimes so far that the rounded portions nearly met and closed off the corridor. Between the lumps, water dripped down the walls to join a thin, sluggish stream on the floor. Dib inhaled. There was a strange smell down there, apart from the stale air and wet rock. Something smelled… _sweet. _

He squeezed down the corridor, climbing over the rock-bulges where they came too close together to slip between. The smell grew stronger the farther he crept. The water level on the floor rose until it submerged his boots, sloshing over the tops and filling them up. His pants soaked up past the knees.

"It _is _in here," he said, voice rough and dampened in the close space. "What else would smell sweet this deep underground?"

_Subterrenean beehives?_

He scoffed. "That's ridiculous." His foot slipped on the slimy rocks beneath the water, and he steadied himself with a hand to the wall. "You're hoping you find nothing down here."

_Why would I hope that?_

"Because it will change everything. If there actually is Choconium, distracting Zim won't be enough." He ducked under length of rock stretching across the passage, like a miniature bridge. "You will have to prepare for certain eventualities: Zim may grow bored of your 'distraction' and return to searching for Choconium; the Irkens may have other agents on the planet. Or they may think to send one when it becomes clear that Zim is now less active in Earth conquest and more active in your pants."

_Hey!_

"I would consider forcing Zim to contact his leaders and once again assure them there is nothing worthwhile on this planet."

_Oh, like that's not suspicious._

"True. Perhaps coax him into one of his moronic schemes that will never pan out. Have his harass his leaders with the details. We know how thrilled they will be with _that. _It may remind them why they don't tend to bother with this planet."

_You know, that might work._

The water was halfway up his thighs. His feet slipped and stumbled on the passage floor. He found handholds in the wall and pulled himself along. Ahead, at the edge of the goggles' range of night vision, something fluttered in the dark. Dib froze. The water stopped sloshing around his legs and the passage was silent except for dripping water – and a faint, far-off chittering sound. Just as Dib noticed it, the sound stopped, and whatever was fluttering up ahead faded back into the dark.

He swallowed and rested his hand on the raygun tucked into his belt. Maybe instead of Choconium he'd discovered some horrible subterranean race – mole people, or things with tentacles and billion-year-old eyes. At least he'd brought his camera. He crept forward more cautiously. The water level continued to rise until it reached his beltloops. He held his camera and raygun above his head and wondered if he was going to have to start swimming soon.

The thing in the dark fluttered again, this time closer. He could see it through the goggles' night vision now: a black blob on the surface of the water. It froze for a second, then skidded across the surface toward Dib, slicing a triangle of wake behind it. Dib flattened against the wall of the passage and pointed the raygun at the blob. It skittered past him down the center of the passage. Dib let out a breath and inched along the wall. He must be close by now: the cave smelled like on ice cream shop.

His foot bumped something, and the water's surface exploded around him. Dozens of fluttering black blobs burst out of the water. They were bugs, big-torsoed flies without wings, with spindly legs to patter on the water's surface. The water was past his waist now. It buoyed his t-shirt up, exposing his middle. The bugs bumped against his belly and sides, fist-sized and slimy and soft like overripe avocadoes. He gave into his first instinct and fired the raygun aimlessly into the swarm.

The ray flashed green in the night vision, bright enough to blind him for a second. It didn't disburse the bugs. Instead they grew more frenzied. The water around him boiled. His fingers tightened on the raygun trigger again.

"No!" he shouted. His hand relaxed. "Are you stupid? I mean are you truly, irredeemably stupid? You don't know how stable this place is. If I'm right, most of it is made of chocolate! It's the fucking _gingerbread house._"

_How do I get rid of them?!_

"You don't. They're harmless. If they were going to bite or sting you, they would have already. You pissed them off enough."

Dib stayed pressed against the wall and tried to slow his breathing. The bugs calmed with him and soon the roiling water slowed to the occasional burble. Dib didn't dare move, now that he knew the water was full of those things.

"Exactly," he said. "They're in the water. Of course! I should have known there would be something down here feeding on it." Dib didn't want to move but his body went ahead and crouched, submerging him up to his chest. "And water erodes – so if the vein is exposed anywhere it will be—"

He held the camera in his mouth and reached into the water. His hand brushed several bugs on the way down, kicking off another mass frenzy. He ignored it and felt along the bottom of the passage. Down at the water, the waffle-cone smell was stronger, almost overwhelming.

His fingers found a deep crack on the bottom of the passage. Inside the fissure the rock's texture changed: it was smoother, and when he pushed on it, it crumbled like classroom chalk. He pinched a crumbled-off chunk between his finger and brought it up out of the water. Through the night vision goggles it was dark, the same black as the bugs – beyond that, he couldn't determine the colour until he got it up to the surface.

He brought it close to his face, stuck his tongue out and licked it. It was so sweet he thought his teeth would fall out just from tasting it. He cringed; his tongue practically went numb. Yup – definitely something Zim's species would like.

Dib gathered half a dozen chunks of Choconium, each about the size of a quarter. He climbed back up through the cave and squeezed out into the bright hot afternoon, soaking wet and sinkingly aware that everything had changed.

--

Upon arriving at planet Earth, Elite Soldier Drylow realized why the Tallest had initially considered it worthless. For one, it was mostly covered in a hydrogen-oxygen compound. The two-hydro-one-oxium itself was unremarkable, but Drylow's ships scanner said that most of it was inundated with pollutants, making it corrosive to Irken skin. Also, its inhabitants were ugly, even from a distance. Instead of antennae, they had hundreds of thin, apparently useless fibres on top of their round heads. They did not deserve to be as tall as they were.

Drylow orbited the planet and waited for his scanners to detect Choconium. He was in the middle of an action figure dramatic _pre_-enactment of his Tallest praising him for a successful mission when the ship found a subsurface Snack Ore vein, somewhere along the West edge of a large land-blob. He flew low over the area and traced ever-decreasing circles over the rocky lumps of land, trying to pinpoint where the Choconium was closest to the surface.

He'd narrowed it down to one of the long, winding ditches between the land-crags, when suddenly the deposit _moved. _At least, a portion of it moved. It breached the planet's surface, stayed on the ground for about twenty feet, then launched into the air. Drylow scratched his head shifted the ship into gear and headed after the fleeing Choconium. As he approached, his sensors picked up something else: the mobile Choconium was wrapped in a shell of Irken technology. A ship came within visual range – another Irken cruiser, Voot class Q (discontinued years ago), heavily modified from the looks of it.

Drylow followed at a steady distance. He sat back in his seat and wrung his hands. Naturally he would never _question _or _disobey _an order from his Almighty Tallest, but he was still profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of killing a fellow Irken. Sure, he would wipe out lesser species in the squeeze of a squeedly-spooch, but that was different. Assassinate his own kind? But those were his orders. If he detected Choconium, he was to eliminate Zim, lest his very presence curse the proceeding invasion.

However, because Zim was Irken and not some other filthy species, Drylow would at least allow him the courtesy of a warning. He opened up communications with the Voot. "Food Service Drone Zim. This is Elite Soldier Drylow. I am under orders to remove you from this planet. Land your ship and come willingly, or I will be forced to shoot you down."

For a long moment, no response came. Drylow shook his head and warmed up the ship's guns He locked onto Zim's cruiser – strangely, it wasn't speeding up or trying any evasive moves. It just floated along ahead of him, maintaining a steady speed.

Before he could fire, a transmission came in from Zim's ship. The audio crackled, and a deep voice garbled something in an alien language. A second later the video came in: instead of Zim, one of the ugly Earth-pigs sat in the pilot's seat. He kept chattering in his weird, warbling tongue, and waving his hands around. Drylow's antennae perked – he switched on the translator.

"—need to know you're not just gonna _kill _me when I land this thing."

Drylow leaned in toward the monitor. "Food Service Drone Zim? Your disguise is – rather impressive, actually."

"What?" The Earth-thing ceased its arm-flailing and tilted its head. "No, I'm not Zim! I stole his ship. I don't even really know how to fly it."

Drylow made a gagging noise. "Revolting Earth animal. I should kill you for daring to _touch _Irken property."

The Earth-thing went still and stared at the monitor. It leaned back and laced its fingers over its belly. The hand flailing and panicky chatter seemed to have passed. It said, "Why do you need to get rid of Zim? And why did you call him a 'food service drone'?"

Drylow sneered. "I'm not required to answer questions by inferior alien filth. Land the Voot cruiser and remove yourself, or I _will _shoot you down."

"I have a better idea." The Earth-thing held its fingers up. "Promise you won't kill me, and I'll tell you where Zim is, and how to get past his defences."

Drylow narrowed his eyes and folded his arms on the console. He was having trouble locating the rogue Irken and it would speed up the mission significantly to have whatever security information was stored in Zim's Voot, and apparently in the Earth-thing's head. Plus, he could take the sample of Choconium that the Earth-thing somehow had in its possession. The sooner he completed the mission, the sooner his Tallest ordered a 98 lazer cannon volley in his honour and declared Universal Elite Soldier Drylow Day.

"Very well," he said to the Earth-thing. They spiralled down and landed on the side of one of the rock-lumps, amid the tall spiky vegetation. Although their side of the planet was facing the sun, down at ground level it was as dark as an eclipse. The low atmosphere clouds blocking the sun rumbled with discharging electricity.

Drylow collected his gun and a sample canister, clipped both to his belt and climbed out of his Spittle Runner. The atmosphere outside was clammy; a sour smell assaulted the olfactory sensors on his antennae. The ground gave a little under his feet. Upon closer inspection he found it was covered with a deep pillowy layer of loose plant matter. The planet's inhabitants hadn't even the sense to strip its surface and build something useful on it. What a waste.

The Earth-thing strode over from the Voot cruiser. What the communication monitor hadn't told Drylow was how _tall _the creature was. It was a full segment taller than Red or Purple, may the Tallest forgive him for observing. A bent stalk of head-fibres stuck out the top of its skull, adding nearly a quarter-segment to its height. It was – it was gratuitous! No creature so inferior to Irkens should be so tall! Looking up at it made Drylow light-headed.

The Earth-thing crossed its arms. "What did you say your name was?"

"Elite Soldier Drylow, Class A4 Special Operations."

"You called Zim a 'food service drone.' I thought he was an Invader."

Drylow threw his head back and cackled. "Zim? An Invader? The only reason that moron isn't in prison is because it costs the Empire less to leave him exiled here."

The Earth-thing scratched its chin. "I guess I'm not really surprised." It squatted so its face was level with Drylow's. "You want to get Zim out of the way, right? Well so do I."

Drylow rolled his shoulders. The creature's tallness was having a strange effect on him. His squeedly-spooch was working double-time and he felt an inexplicable urge to _listen _to the thing's words. "And you suggest what? An alliance? I'll complete the mission with or without your help."

"All you have to do is not kill me," said the thing. "That's all, okay? And I'll make your job way easier."

Drylow shook his head, trying to clear it out. "Very well. But you'll hand over the Choconium in your possession."

The creature's head jerked back. "How do you know I have that?"

Drylow flapped his hand. "Don't bother trying to comprehend our superior ways with your tiny brain."

The Earth-thing chuckled. "Wow. You're all kind of like that, huh?"

"Excuse me?"

It straightened to its full height and cleared its throat. "Nothing. What was your plan to get Zim?"

Drylow opened his mouth to reply. Something dropped onto the top of his head and suddenly there was a sharp pain between his antennae. Another one of the skin-searing drops landed on his arm; a small white wisp curled up off the burning spot. "Twohydro oneoxium! Damn your dirty planet!"

He fled back to his ship, and the Earth-thing followed. Drylow sat in the Spittle Runner's cockpit with the bubble half-closed, shielding him and his Tallest memorabilia from the horrible sky-spit. The Earth-thing, apparently immune to the wet, crouched beside the ship and spoke through the gap between hull and cockpit bubble. They devised a plan to get rid of Zim.

--

After almost an hour of plotting with the "Elite Soldier Irken," Dib delivered the Choconium samples to Drylow's ship, then returned to his own. He climbed into the cockpit and settled into the pilot's seat – and came face-to-face with Zim's unamused scowl on the communication monitor.

Zim growled. "Dib-worm! You _took _the Voot cruiser?"

Dib tried his best to look clueless and sheepish. "Calm down, okay? I just wanted to take it out for a spin."

"Without Zim?" The alien shook his fist at the screen.

"You're a backseat driver, Zim. It's annoying." He propped his chin up. Look casual. "Anyway, you fell asleep after we, you know. I didn't want to wake you up."

Zim huffed. "You humans and your horrible _sleep._" He squinted at something below the screen. "You took it for a spin halfway across the planet?"

Dib rubbed the back of his neck. "Yeah. About that. I kind of got a little lost."

Zim snorted and put on his smug face. "I don't know how you even maintain your life-systems, with a brain as dumb as yours."

"Hey." Dib blew a raspberry at the alien. "Are you going to make fun of me, or are you going to tell me how to get this thing home?"

Zim talked him through the Voot's navigation system and Earth-map. Dib pretended to blunderingly follow along. Once he had the ship airborne and on course for home, he ended the communication, and reprogrammed the ship to make a detour.

He reached the city and instead of heading for Zim's base he landed on a hill overlooking town – not his and Zim's cliff-edge, but farther down the same hill-range, where the cliffs softened to grassy slopes. A few minutes later, Drylow's ship settled down beside him, and the Irken emerged from the cockpit. Drylow flipped open a panel on the bottom of his ship, pulled out a ridged purple tube, and pulled it over to Zim's Voot. Dib opened the bubble and helped the alien plug the tube into the side of the ship.

Drylow hopped back into his own ship and typed furiously on the console. "Fantastic, yes. Everything's here: logs, base schematics, access codes. If you can get me manual access to his base, I can immobilize it completely."

"Including communications?" Dib found his voice was doing the scratchy-nasally thing again. "Zim can't have any access to the outside world. He may not have many allies, but he's resourceful when he needs to be."

Drylow paused and raised an eyebrow at Dib. "Once I have his base locked down I will have it self-destruct around him. Exactly how much time do you think he will have to call for help?"

Dib's eye twitched. He shrugged. "He doesn't need much time." He waved at Drylow's control panel. "Just make sure you lock down his communications, okay? And no transmitting in to him while you shut him down. Victory monologues are plain amateur."

Drylow sniffed. "Agreed." He finished the data transfer and signalled to Dib to unplug and retract the tube.

"Zim has monitors around the perimeter, but I know a couple blind spots." Dib closed the panel on the bottom of Drylow's ship and got back into his own. "I'll meet you on the road behind his house. Hide or cloak your ship, if you're going to land it close by."

"Don't tell me how to operate, Earth-thing," Drylow snapped. "I am an Elite Soldier; I've trained for this all my life."

"Fine," said Dib. "But don't forget, I'm the expert on Zim."

The two ships lifted off the slope and flew down toward the city. Drylow's shimmered out of sight. Dib couldn't find the cloaking on Zim's Voot, so he stuck to flying high and hoping nobody looked up. If Zim could pilot this thing without being caught, it couldn't be _that _difficult.

He landed a block down the street from Zim's base, next to a playground and splash pad. With any luck, passersby would mistake it for a piece of playground equipment. Dib grabbed the raygun from the cockpit floor, shut down and locked up the ship, and headed for Zim's house. This time he tucked the gun between his belt and the small of his back.

As planned, he met Drylow on the street behind Zim's house. They crouched behind the fence and peered between the slats; Dib traced out a route to get Drylow to the "dog house" in the backyard without being caught by security. The little lopsided shed was actually another security device, like a periscope poking up from the levels below the yard. There Drylow could plug in and disable the entire base.

"Okay," Dib whispered. "One more thing. Zim has it set up, like honeycomb down there: lots of pockets, not much reinforcement. If you blow it up with us in the yard, we'll go down with it. Can you link it to a remote detonator instead? That way we can put some distance first."

"Of course I can." Drylow fiddle with the device he'd brought to hack into the base. It looked like one of Gaz's handheld game systems. "Right. You had better be right about this blind spot." Drylow's spider legs emerged from his Pak and carried him over the fence into Zim's yard.

Dib kept an eye on Drylow through the fence slats. It would take the Irken a little while to trace Dib's winding path to the dog house. Dib knelt and rubbed his shoulder.

_I can't believe I'm actually doing this._

He whispered, "Yes, well. Get used to the idea. No more alien tongue-tennis. What a shame."

_Yeah, instead I'm teaming up with another alien, and this one reports directly to their leaders. That's much better._

"You say 'teaming up,' I say 'using'."

_And when he tries to report to the mothership that Earth's ripe for invasion?_

Dib reached behind his back and tapped the gun tucked into his belt.

_Ah._

In the yard, Drylow reached the dog house, pried open a panel on the side and slapped the device onto the exposed electronics. The screen on the device flickered green and the alien tapped the buttons along the bottom and sides. Instantly the satellite dish on top of Zim's house folded and retracted. Riveted metal sheets slid down over all the windows and the peaked roof collapsed into a flat, reinforced metal cap. More whirring sounds came from inside the house, then from underneath the yard, soon fading down toward the lower levels of the base.

Soon Dib couldn't hear the sliding metal and down-winding notes of electronics shutting off, but he could picture what was going on down below. The house computer would report the malfunction in the upper levels. Zim would have about two minutes to scream at the computer for reports and explanations before the shutdown reached him and the computer voice when silent, the interface stopped responding, the lights went out. Zim was left to stumble around in the dark, crawl around in the tubes and passages of his own base, but blocked from the outside by layers of impenetrable Irken alloy. And he would have no idea why.

Drylow's program, he had assured Dib, would scramble and encrypt Zim's base's systems so thoroughly that he would not be able to access them in a thousand years, much less the five or ten minutes he would have before the base collapsed on him. The device's screen flashed from green to yellow, then softened to black. Drylow detached it from the dog house and strutted back across the lawn to Dib. No need to sneak now. Zim couldn't see a thing. He couldn't do a thing to them. He could sit in the dark and rave.

Dib stood up and waved Drylow past. "Head back to your ship. That'll be far enough away from here Then you can finish it."

Drylow nodded at him on his way past, like a man tipping his hat. He waited until Drylow was past him, as if he intended to follow the Irken. Maybe they would press the detonator button down by Drylow's ship, then shake hands and congratulate each other on an assassination well done.

Dib pulled the raygun out from behind his back and shot Drylow four times: in the head, shoulder, and twice in the Pak. The Irken didn't scream, just grunted and sprawled on the pavement in a puddle of black internal fluid. A second after he stopped twitching, his Pak exploded, setting the corpse on fire.

"Huh," said Dib. "Must have had a self-destruct."

_I killed him._

"Yes." He tucked the gun back into his belt. "I killed him. I protected the Earth from invasion. _And _I let your idiotic alien fucktoy live."

_He's locked up in there._

Dib put his hands in his pockets and paced away from the burning body. "It could be worse. I could have let the other Irken finish it. Besides, you knew it would come to this." He paused and dipped his head. "You _intended _it to come to this."

_Yeah… yeah, I did. I guess I did._

He resumed walking. "Of course." He returned to Zim's Voot cruiser and flew it back to the Membrane house. He stashed it in the garage where Tak's ship had parked before that horrible incident with the lasagne. Earth was safe for another day.

--

Johnny C. sat on the stairs between two of the house's lower levels, head in his hands. The Burger Boy sat beside him, balanced precariously on the edge of the step.

"That's it?" said Johnny. "That's what I haven't been remembering? That I was a teenage sexual deviant?"

"You also killed that alien." Burger Boy's voice seemed to ooze out of him.

Johnny backhanded the Burger Boy off the step. "Who cares?! I kill people all the time, human people! In fact, that guy upstairs on the head-twisty machine should be dead by now."

Burger Boy rolled across the floor and settled on his side, his shiny face toward Johnny. "But we're not done! Oh no. There are even more fun things for you to remember."

The doorbell shrieked and whimpered.

Burger Boy tittered. "There he is now! Go bring him in. Fulfill the needs you have been ignoring."

Johnny sat back down on the stairs. "That part of it doesn't make sense. I remember _doing _those things, but I don't remember the _wanting. _In fact all I feel is nausea. And hate."

The doorbell screamed again. Something pounded up above.

"How times change," said Burger Boy. "You used to be the aware one."

Johnny grabbed a knife off the floor and threw it at the Burger Boy. It stuck in the floor, inches away from his ceramic gut. "Fuck your riddles! Tell me what that means."

The Boy cackled. Somewhere above them, wood splintered and crashed, and something skittered like a giant crab, heavy enough to creak the floorboards. It crashed through another door and clattered down stairwells, down through the levels between Johnny and the surface. Burger Boy kept laughing. The skittering thing thumped on the level above him and pounded across the floor. Johnny felt a tickle around the back of his chest cavity, like something trying to reach out from his ribs, and realized it was his body trying, and failing, to feel fear.

--

Dib never knew for sure how Drylow did it: maybe he sent a message to his leaders on the way form Spuzzumland to the city, or maybe when he self-destructed his ship instantly auto-piloted for home. Either way, exactly one year after Dib locked Zim in his base and shot down Elite Soldier Drylow, the Irken Armada appeared in the skies.

So much for having saved the world.


End file.
